


At the still point of the turning world

by HelveticaBrown



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Divorced Lesbian Mommies AU, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-03 07:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15814347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelveticaBrown/pseuds/HelveticaBrown
Summary: Three years ago, Emma and Regina’s marriage broke down and Emma’s been running from the shattered remnants of her life ever since. But with the arrival of a new set of divorce papers and a visit from Henry in quick succession, it seems like the past is finally catching up to her. Emma has no choice but to go back to Storybrooke where she finds out that Regina’s already moved on with her lifeDivorced lesbian mommies with a side order of parent trap.Written for Swan Queen Supernova III





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misthavens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misthavens/gifts).
  * Inspired by [at the still point of the turning world {art}](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15788511) by [misthavens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misthavens/pseuds/misthavens). 



> Huge thanks to misthavens for creating something so wonderful to go with my fic, even though I was hopeless and didn't get the story finished until almost the last moment. And also thank you to AgathasAjax for being a safe pair of eyes who kept this fic from being a total mess.
> 
> And massive shoutout to the SQSN moderators for all the hard work they put in to events like this that help keep the Swan Queen fandom vibrant.
> 
> The title is shamelessly stolen from the TS Eliot poem, Burnt Norton

Emma doesn’t need to open it to know what’s in the heavy yellow envelope the courier had handed her. She knows what’s in it, because there’s an identical one that’s been sitting in her bottom drawer for the last three years. She also knows that good things never come in envelopes like this. She’s been carrying it around from city to city and she’s lost count of the number dingy apartments and sublets she’s lived in in that time. It’s been a long time since she’s really had a place to call home, as long as that envelope’s been in her possession.

This one’s a little less dingy than most; at least the plumbing works – mostly – and she hasn’t found any suspicious holes in the wall. At the last place – or was it the place before – she’d almost broken the nose of the live-in custodian when she caught him peeping at one of the women down the hall. So far, there haven’t been any peeping toms and the neighbours are quiet and mind their own business; just the way she likes it. No, this place is mostly un-terrible and maybe she’ll try to make a go of it here for a while.

She grabs a beer out of the fridge and sits down, contemplating the envelope on the coffee table in front of her. She necks half her beer and then reaches out to the still-unopened envelope, arranges it carefully so its edges line up with the corner of the table. She goes to her bedroom, opens the drawer and pulls out the envelope’s twin and tosses it carelessly onto the table. It knocks over her half-empty beer and she can’t help but feel a slight, momentary satisfaction when the expanding puddle of ale engulfs both of the envelopes.

She stares at the mess in front of her and wonders, _why now?_

*****

She’s just sat down with another beer, which she hopefully won’t spill this time, ready to watch a re-run of Ninja Warrior when there’s a knock on her door. She tries to ignore it, but it keeps getting more insistent. She sighs and finally hauls herself off the sofa, getting ready to tell the Jehovah’s Witnesses or whoever it is to fuck off and leave her in peace.

She opens the door, freezing in surprise at the person who greets her on the other side.

“Henry? What on earth are you doing here?” she asks, when she finally manages to marshal her wits enough to find her words.

She hasn’t seen Henry since she and Regina had broken up and she almost doesn’t recognise him as the small, sullen boy Regina had brought home from the adoption agency all that time ago. She’d recognised that look back then, because it had been the same one she’d seen in the mirror every day of her life in foster care. Now, though, he’s impeccably dressed (even if Regina’s tastes do run a little towards accountant-chic) and as he meets her eyes boldly, she can see that the last few years have been good for him.

Her surprise yields to a pang of loss at that thought, because even though he was Regina’s son, for a time there’d been something between them, something that had felt a little like a make-good from the universe for all the shit she’d been through growing up. It had been hard letting go of that and she’d thought about reaching out a thousand times, just to see how he was going, but Regina had made it abundantly clear when she left that Emma had no claim, legal or otherwise, on Henry’s time.

A few times, after a few too many drinks, she’d picked up the phone, calling the old number and listening to Regina’s clipped tones on the answering machine before remembering that they were both thousands of miles away in Vancouver. Those moments had always ended with an empty bottle of something and a multitude of regrets, the least of which was the resulting hangover.

Looking at him now, it’s obvious Regina made the right decision. Without her, Henry has thrived, and he’s been spared all of the ugliness that she knows can creep in when a relationship breaks down. None of that explains why he’s standing on her doorstep in Boston on a Saturday evening.

His words, when he finally speaks, don’t do a great deal to shed light on the situation. “You need to come home to Storybrooke. It’s an emergency.”

“What’s happened?” All sorts of scenarios flash through her mind, each more terrible than the last.

“Mom’s getting married.” Even though it’s far less terrible than some of the things she’d imagined, her heart still sinks.

She looks over at the sodden envelopes behind her, on her coffee table; Henry’s statement is confirmation of exactly what she had already known must be in that second envelope and now she knows why Regina’s chasing her again for a divorce after all this time.

It had taken months before she was able to open the first envelope and read through the divorce papers. They’d only been together a little more than two years, and by most people’s standards, that probably wasn’t much of a relationship. But even still, there was something so cold and clinical about the sum total of a relationship being defined in a series of clauses and a monetary value.

The financial terms of Regina’s proposed settlement had been very generous – far more generous than it needed to be – and she could just imagine the pained look on Regina’s lawyer’s face as he drew up the document. It wasn’t about the money, though. It’d never been about money, even though it had been obvious from the very start that Regina had plenty of it.

But none of that is important right now. What is important is Henry standing here in front of her, a few hundred miles away from where he should be and she’s caught between being delighted to see him and just a little bit furious. She’s not his mother, but she’s also not going to go easy on him for pulling a stunt like this. She folds her arms, pinning him with the kind of look that promises a serious ass-kicking.

“I don’t think that really counts as the kind of emergency that justifies you running away to Boston.” He looks like he’s about to argue and if Emma’s honest, she kind of doesn’t have a leg to stand on, because Regina’s the reason she’s spent the better part of the last three years running halfway across the country and back.

She pushes that thought aside. “How’d you get here, anyway?”

“Stole Mom’s credit card and caught the bus.”

She’s caught between a degree of admiration at his resourcefulness and anger at the thought of him putting himself in danger like that.

“Can I stay here for a while?”

“Not a chance. We’re getting you back to Storybrooke before your mother decides to come down here and murder one or both of us.” She’s pretty sure which one of them will be in trouble and knowing Regina, it won’t be the 11-year-old who ran away to Boston.

“I mean _after_ you’ve gone to Storybrooke and saved Mom from marrying The Douche.”

“Somehow, I doubt your Mom wants to see me, but I know she’s definitely going to want you home as soon as possible.”

She’s kind of hoping he’ll argue with her on the first point, but she’s not surprised when he doesn’t.

She picks up her phone. She’d deleted Regina’s number years ago, but she still knows it by heart. She dials the numbers slowly and listens as it rings, wondering what exactly she should say to Regina. She’s not sure whether she’s disappointed or not when it goes through to voicemail. She leaves a short message and hangs up, before turning back to Henry.

“Okay, kid. Let’s go.”

*****

Emma’s never been much of a conversationalist, but she tries to fill the long car ride. There’s a lot to catch up on, but it feels mostly bittersweet hearing about the details of Henry and Regina’s life without her in it. It’s a series of memories she should have made alongside them; instead she’s spent the last three years trying to forget what she'd had.

She wonders if Henry still has his book of fairytales. He’d come to them from the orphanage, clutching the heavy book under one arm, a threadbare teddy bear under the other. The bear looked like the kind of generic charity appeal Christmas gift that all the kids wound up with, Emma knew from experience. Her own, much-loved late teddy, Mr Grizzly, had ended up the victim of an older kid who’d decided to use him for dissection practice.

But the book had been something special. She remembers Henry poring over it for hours on end, even though she and Regina were pretty sure he didn’t know how to read yet. It took three months before he’d let either of them touch it and she remembers the smile that had dawned on Regina’s face at that first evidence of trust, luminous and utterly besotted with this small, quiet boy she’d chosen to be part of her family. That trust had bloomed and it wasn’t long before Henry lying between them on Regina’s bed as they took turns to read the stories from his book became a nightly ritual.

“When did you get back to Storybrooke?”

“Almost a year ago.”

“And you’re back for good?” She’d kind of half-expected Regina to stay in Vancouver.

“Yeah. Mom decided not to try for another contract. I kind of wish she had, though.”

“You liked it there?”

“It was okay.”

Emma rolls her eyes at that. It’s such a typical pre-teen, non-committal response, but she gets the sense that Henry thought it was a little bit more than just okay. 

“Besides, if we’d stayed there, Mom wouldn’t have met The Douche,” Henry adds a moment later.

“So, your Mom’s fiancée…” Emma asks, even though she doesn’t really want to know. She’d tortured herself plenty of times with thoughts of what Regina might be doing, who she might be with. Now, given the opportunity to give those abstractions form, she hates herself for it, but she also can’t resist finding out.

“He’s kind of a dick,” Henry says.

“Language,” Emma chastises him reflexively, although she mostly (completely) agrees with him on that point, even without meeting the guy.

“Well he is. Aunt Zelena says he’s a smarmy git.”

“So, does he have a name, other than _The Douche_?”

She doesn’t need to look over to know that Henry’s scowling. “Robin.”

“How long?” In spite of herself, she can’t help asking just how quickly Regina moved on.

“Last Spring.”

So only a few months.

Emma wishes she could say the same for herself, but three years later, she still feels like she’s stuck in a holding pattern. It’s ridiculous, because before Regina had swooped in and upended her life, Emma had been in exactly the same place. A new town every few months. An unmemorable series of jobs–enough to pay the rent and keep her car running long enough to get to the next stop.

“And they’re engaged already?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Henry shrug. “He’s a dick, but he’s not an idiot. He knows he’s onto a good thing with Mom and he needs to seal the deal before she comes to her senses. Which is why it’s so important that you come back and make her see that. I’ve tried and Aunt Zelena’s tried but Mom’s so stubborn.”

Emma sighs, because Regina’s not the only one in the family who’s stubborn. The kid sitting next to her pretty much defines that quality right now and the more time she’s spending with him, the more she can see little parts of Regina reflected back at her.

“Maybe that’s telling you something, Henry. Like, maybe she’s happy with him, however much of a dick you think he is.”

Henry makes a frustrated noise and kicks his foot against the car door.

“Careful, kid. If you want to get anywhere at all, let alone Storybrooke, you’re going to have to treat The Bug nice. She’s pretty much only held together with duct tape these days.”

He manages a grudging apology, but then he’s right back onto his cause of the moment. “She just hasn’t had time to see him for what he is, yet.”

“Have you given him a chance? Tried to get to know him?” Emma can’t believe she’s defending the guy, when instinctively she hates him and wants him about ten thousand miles away from Regina.

“I don’t like him and I don’t want to get to know him.”

She gets it. She really does, but it’s also not her place to interfere in Regina’s relationships and it’s something Henry and Regina will need to sort out between themselves.

“I don’t know what you think I’m supposed to do about it. If you’re expecting me to burst into the church like some deranged jealous ex-wife when the priest asks if anyone objects to the union, it’s not gonna happen.”

From Henry’s silence, she can tell that’s exactly what he was expecting her to do.

“Kid, there’s no way in hell I’m buying into this. Your Mom and I aren’t exactly on great terms–” technically they’re on no terms at all–“but I’d probably prefer it if she didn’t want to actively murder me.”

“She’s getting married in a bloody forest.” Henry continues to make his case and Emma rolls her eyes at what is very obviously a quote from Zelena. “Can you imagine her running around in a forest in a wedding dress, up to her ankles in bear poop? He’s obviously brainwashed her somehow. Maybe he’s drugged her, or poisoned her...”

She interrupts him before he can go any further down the rabbit hole. “I don’t know what to say, kid. You know your Mom used to ride horses for fun once upon a time. Pretty sure she’s been in a forest at least once or twice in her life and maybe even enjoyed it.”

“He drives a Smart car,” Henry says, as if this single fact is the trump card that’s going to get her to change her mind.

Emma snorts. She hasn’t met the guy, but he sounds ridiculous. “And I drive a clapped-out Bug that your Mom thinks should have been scrapped years ago.” She pats the steering wheel and mutters a quiet apology to her faithful steed at even mentioning such a terrible thing.

“So what are the rest of his crimes, other than driving a ridiculous pretend car? Has he tried to feed you tofu?”

Henry wrinkles up his nose. “Gross. But yeah, he cooks weird food. And he goes around turning all the lights off behind me and even though he doesn’t say anything I know he wants to be on my case about stuff all the time.”

“You know, I might have to agree with him on the lights thing. You were pretty notorious for that as I recall,” she teases him gently, mindful of the fact that she’s pretty sure he was afraid of the dark, at least back then.

“You haven’t signed the divorce papers yet, have you?”

Emma shakes her head, partly in confirmation and partly at herself for managing to get even slightly sucked into this ridiculous scheme.

“Good,” he says a little gloatingly. “Make sure you don’t. There’s no way they’re getting married next month.”

“Next month?”

“Yeah. The wedding’s on the eighth.”

Two weeks away. It hadn’t occurred to her that it would be so soon.

*****

They stop for gas about an hour out of Storybrooke and when Emma checks her phone there’s about a thousand missed calls. Her thumb hovers over the call button for a long moment of indecision before she chucks her phone back into her bag. Regina will probably kill her for not returning the call, but she’s pretty sure she can be on the road and halfway back to Boston by the time Regina’s stopped hugging Henry and telling him off.

She figures she’ll take her chances.

Henry raids the shelves of the gas station for pretty much every kind of junk food under the sun, looking a little defiant, but she just rolls her eyes and hands over her credit card, snagging a Coke for herself. She figures Regina’s going to make him eat his vegetables anyway, so what’s the harm.

He starts eyeing a rack of magazines and Emma drags him back out to the car before he does something stupid like try to sneak a girlie magazine into his pile of loot. Knowing Regina that would definitely be a hanging offence.


	2. Chapter 2

Coming back to Storybrooke is weird. She’d spent almost as long there as she has anywhere in her adult life and it’s familiar in a way that’s thoroughly disconcerting. She drives the streets almost on auto-pilot, her body remembering each and every turn on the way to Regina’s house. For a moment, it feels like coming home, but then they’re pulling into the driveway at 108 Mifflin and the unfamiliar car in the driveway is a stark reminder that she’s not and never will be again.

She wasn’t planning to get out of the car, but Henry’s threat that he’d run straight back to the bus station if she didn’t has kind of left her without a choice. She knows he’d do it, too. She also knows Regina would be pissed if she didn’t personally hand-deliver him back to her custody. And so she parks behind Regina’s Mercedes and trudges the rest of the way up the driveway with Henry, up to the front porch.

It feels wrong to be standing on the other side of the door. Once upon a time this had been her home. Hers and Henry’s and Regina’s. Now, though, she’s a stranger ringing the doorbell standing in the ruins of what she’d hoped would be her forever.

Henry’s fidgeting beside her, looking sulky. She’d told him another half a dozen times on the drive here that she wasn’t going to get involved in his scheme and it seems like he’s finally got the message.

The door opens, and it’s not Regina. There’s a man standing in the doorway and he looks first at her and then at Henry, with what seems like a dozen lines furrowing his brow.

This must be Robin.

Robin is, she supposes, reasonably attractive in a bottle of tequila, 10 years of celibacy, favourable lighting conditions, last person on earth kind of way. Which is to say, she honestly can’t even begin to comprehend what Regina sees in him.

A moment later, he’s joined by Regina and he puts an arm around her shoulders. Emma can’t help the way she bristles at the sight of him and how casually he puts his hands on Regina. She knows she doesn’t have a right to, but she hates him for it anyway.

She feels a brief flicker of satisfaction when Regina shrugs him off and rushes forward to Henry.

Emma fidgets with her car keys, feeling very much out of place and wishing she’d stuck to her guns and left without seeing Regina. Seeing Henry and Regina like that reminds her of all the things she’d hoped she’d found and all the things she’s lost.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Robin, looking just about as awkward as she feels and she might have felt a little sympathy for him, except she mostly just wants to punch him in the face.

Finally, after she’s finished telling Henry off and sent him upstairs, Regina looks at her and although it’s not the warm welcome she’d like it to be, mild exasperation is infinitely better than anything Emma had been expecting. At least it’s _something_ , which is far more than Emma feels like she got in the end. Their separation had been– _disinterested_ is the only word that springs to mind and even though Emma had longed to do something, say _something_ to provoke any kind of reaction, she’d held back. She wonders, now, if that was the right thing to do. At least anger would have been proof that Regina cared in some way, cared enough to expend some kind of emotional energy on Emma.

But all of that is academic now. She’d left with a whimper rather than a bang and three years later Regina’s getting married to someone who isn’t her and there’s a beer-soaked pile of papers that reduce their relationship to a series of terms of conditions burning a hole in Emma’s brain and her heart.

Regina looks at her for a long moment and Emma can’t even begin to read her expression. “I suppose you’d better come in,” she says.

She follows Regina inside. Robin makes as if to follow them, but Regina waves him away and Emma chooses to take it as another tiny victory in a game she’s not supposed to be playing.

They go into Regina’s study and Emma perches awkwardly on the edge of the sofa. It’s strange being here again; there are so many memories in this place. She stifles a smile at the thought that this sofa had played host to at least a couple of the more pleasant memories of her and Regina’s time together. Her fingers idly stroke the soft leather and she wonders if Regina ever looks over and remembers those moments as well.

She doesn’t have much time to reminisce, though, because Regina gets straight down to business. “I take it you received the divorce papers.”

“Yeah,” Emma says, trying to keep her tone neutral, even though just the mention of them feels like another kick in the guts. “I’m kinda surprised you didn’t send them earlier with the wedding so soon.”

“Believe me, I tried,” Regina says, clearly irritated. “But as it turns out, you’ve been very hard to track down. I had to hire an investigator to get me an address for you and it took a while.”

Emma scoffs. “Sounds like an amateur.” Truthfully, though, she _had_ deliberately made herself hard to find and she’s not entirely surprised to learn that she’d caused Regina trouble.

Regina raises an eyebrow. “Your expertise was sadly unavailable to me, so I had to settle for whatever I could get.”

“If I’d known…” She doesn’t get to finish the insincere sentiment, because Regina’s answering for her and she knows Emma a little too well.

“You would have gone even further to ground.” Regina shakes her head. “I don’t understand, Emma. I would have thought you’d be happy to be free of me.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like to sign anything until I’ve read it thoroughly and you know how slow I read,” Emma says, falling back on self-deprecation as a defence against everything Regina’s making her feel.

She kind of hopes Regina will respond to that in some way, but she doesn’t, just purses her lips and says, “I would have hand-delivered the papers myself, but I’ve been covering someone else’s classes this week and I didn’t have time to make the drive. Do you have them for me?”

Emma shakes her head. “Sorry. I left them back in Boston.” It’s a lie. She’d thrown them in the trunk, along with a change of clothes just in case she was too tired to turn around and make the drive back straight away. “I’ll send them to you when I get back.”

Regina sighs. “Yes, well, it’s not like there’s a rush or anything.”

Emma feels a very slight prickle of guilt, but she doesn’t say anything. A moment later, Regina’s filling the silence. “If it’s more money that you’re after, I might be able to accommodate your needs.”

“Pretty sure that overpriced shark of a lawyer of yours wouldn’t want to hear you saying that,” Emma says, trying to keep her tone light and even, but inside, her stomach is sick and churning. Regina’s so desperate to get rid of her that she’s willing to throw even more than the already ridiculous amounts of money she’d been offering at her. It’s not rational to feel this way, she knows. It’s not like she’s been in Regina’s life in any capacity for the last three years and she never will be again. But somehow those papers, still unsigned, feel like a life-raft to cling to when she’s drowning in a sea of hopelessness.

She gets the barest hint of a smile. “I’m sure he wouldn’t. But I don’t want you to feel like you’re being treated unfairly.”

So fucking polite and civilised, like they’re in a business meeting, although she supposes that’s what this is. She doesn’t know when Regina became so calculated; when they’d gotten married, she’d been anything but. Impulsive, filled with fire, utterly intoxicating. But maybe that had been the lie. Maybe Regina had always been like this and she’d never really known her at all.

“I don’t want your money.”

“What do you want, then, Emma?”

She knows what she wants: for all this to have been a bad dream. She wants to wake up part of a family, her and Regina and Henry, wants to hold on tight and never let go. She knows what she wants, but it’s far too late for all of that, so all she can do is shrug helplessly while Regina purses her lips again, obviously impatient for her to leave.

When it’s clear she’s not going to answer, Regina asks instead, “Were you planning to drive back tonight?”

“Yeah.” She’s hellishly tired, but that’s what caffeine is for. Caffeine and a desperate desire to get as far away from Regina and all the memories this place holds before she falls apart completely and does something she regrets.

Regina hesitates, before saying, “There’s a storm forecast for later and I think it’s going to be a nasty one. Maybe you should wait until tomorrow.”

Emma shrugs and says, “I’ll take my chances. Besides, I’m pretty sure you’ll be glad to see the back of me.”

“Emma, don’t,” Regina says, her voice sounding a little pained. Emma’s not quite sure what to make of that. A little more normally, she says, “I’d rather you didn’t wrap yourself around a tree in that horrible death-trap of a car.”

“Really? Because from where I’m sitting, it seems like that’d solve most of your problems.” She regrets it as soon as it’s out of her mouth, knows it’s utterly unfair, but she doesn’t have the power to turn the clock back even those last few seconds. If she did, she’d be finding a way to erase the last three years.

“Don’t even joke about that,” Regina hisses and Emma feels like a total asshole.

“I’m sorry.”

Regina doesn’t respond, just looks at her in a way that has Emma feeling even more guilty and she rushes to fill the silence before it gets even more awkward than it already is. “Look, maybe you’re right. It’s been a long night and I’m obviously not making any sense.”

She _is_ tired after the long drive and she’s not particularly looking forward to turning around and doing it all again in the opposite direction.

“I could make up one of the spare rooms for you,” Regina offers, although she seems relieved when Emma shakes her head.

The thought of spending the night here and watching Regina and Robin play at happy families turns her stomach so much that the prospect of driving through a storm and a fiery death at the hands of a rogue tree sounds inviting in comparison.

“I’ll see if I can get a room at Granny’s. Unless Granny’s isn’t a thing anymore?”

Regina rolls her eyes. “Of course Granny’s is still going. A hurricane could hit the town and I swear that old spitfire would be the only person left standing and she’d still be cooking up a storm.”

Emma stands up, not really hearing Regina’s response. This whole night has been a disaster and the longer she stays here the worse it’s going to get. She’s already said things she regrets, but at the moment she has at least a fraction of her pride intact. She knows, though, that it won’t stay that way for long.

“I won’t take up any more of your time. I’m sure you’ve got things to do, a wedding to plan and all that.”

Regina reaches out and catches her arm for a moment. “Thank you for bringing him home.” There’s a brief, genuine smile that touches Regina’s face and god it feels like seeing the sun for the first time after an eternity underground. She feels hot and cold and everything in between, because all it’s taken is a moment like this with Regina for her to remember how completely not over her she is.

Coming here was a mistake. She should have listened to her instincts and turned and run the moment Henry got out of the car.


	3. Chapter 3

She’d spent a mostly sleepless night in a room at Granny’s that looked like it was last redecorated sometime around the middle of last century. Last night had been a lot to process and all she’d wanted to do was crawl into the bottom of a bottle of scotch. Instead, she’d tried to deal with things like a mature adult, which meant an early night, no alcohol, and a completely frustrating inability to actually stop her brain from running over pretty much every single one of her failures for the last thirty years.

The plan had been to get an early start this morning, to put Storybrooke as far behind her as she could. Unfortunately, the universe had other ideas and now it’s ten in the morning and she’s arguing with the only mechanic in town about fixing a problem she didn’t know she had.

“There’s a problem with your spark plugs, Miss,” Billy says.

“What kind of problem?”

“Well,” he says contemplatively–and Emma kind of wants to shake him until she gets a straight answer out of him–“the problem is they’re gone.”

She stares at him incredulously. “What the hell do you mean they’re gone?”

“Like, not there. _Miss-_ ing,” he says slowly, as if she is a particularly stupid child he’s having to explain particle physics to.

This is absolutely fucking perfect. She knew she should have turned around and driven straight out of Storybrooke last night. The storm hadn’t even been that bad… Sure there had been a few trees down and some minor flooding that she would have had to get through, but really, that wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things.

“Look, I’m not exactly an expert mechanic, myself, but I assume that to drive from Boston to here I would have needed a set of spark plugs.”

“Correct.”

“And you’re saying I don’t have any.”

Billy nods his head. “Also correct.”

“But that should be an easy fix, right?”

He scratches his chin, taking his time to consider what in Emma’s opinion should be a pretty simple question to answer. “It would be, except I don’t have any that would fit your car.”

Emma frowns, pretty sure she’s being played somehow. “Can’t you just use pretty much any spark plugs?”

Billy’s avoiding eye contact and shifting back and forth uncomfortably and Emma’s certain there’s something going on. “Well, the thing is, I don’t have any spark plugs at all. Also, whoever stole yours made a bit of a mess when they were taking them out.”

Emma narrows her eyes. “What kind of mess?”

“The kind that might take a few days to fix.”

Emma can feel the beginnings of a headache, because she feels like she’s been talking in circles for a while and somehow things seem to be getting progressively worse. “How many is _a few_?”

She receives a non-committal shrug in response and resigns herself to a few more days in Storybrooke than she’d planned for. It’s not like she has a Monday to Friday job to go back to, but this is pretty much the last place on earth she wants to be stuck right now. 

She walks back towards the centre of town and her path happens to take her past the Sheriff’s station. She hesitates outside the door for a moment, not really sure that this warrants a formal report.

When she walks in, Mulan has her feet on the desk and is casually tossing a pocket knife from hand to hand and Emma had honestly forgotten just how bad-ass she actually is.

When Mulan looks her up and down and says, “Look what the cat dragged in,” Emma wonders if maybe she should turn around and keep walking.

“I’m here to report a crime,” Emma says, feeling more than a little ridiculous as she does. But she feels like she needs a pretext to be here, because for a while she and Mulan had been close, but when she’d left Regina behind, she’d also left the other parts of her life here. It was supposed to be a clean break, so she couldn’t afford little reminders of what her life had been like here. What it felt like to fit somewhere for the first time, to have friends, to care.

Mulan feigns a hurt look. “Now here I was thinking you were here for the pleasure of my company. And perhaps to buy me that drink you owe me.”

It’s not quite forgiveness, Emma suspects, but it’s close enough and she’ll play along with whatever Mulan wants, because Regina and Henry aside, Emma’s missed having a friend.

She pulls a face and decides to give back just as much as she’s getting, because if she knows Mulan as well as she thinks she does, that’s exactly what she’ll respond to. “Pretty sure you owe _me_ a drink. I seem to recall you lost a bet we had about Ruby and her taste in men, or otherwise.”

Mulan glares at her and Emma’s left thinking that maybe she shouldn’t provoke the scary lady with the knife after all.

“That’s a low blow,” Mulan says. “The thing is, though, you left town and I haven’t found anyone nearly as overconfident as you at pool to fleece in a while. Therefore, by my reckoning, you owe _me_ a drink.” This last part is said with a smile and Emma relaxes a little. Maybe she has read this right.

“Fine. If I’ve got anything left after I’ve fixed my car, I’ll buy you a drink,” Emma says, wincing as she thinks about just how much of a ride Billy’s probably going to take her for.

“How long are you in town for?”

Emma pulls a face. “Too long. Someone made off with some pretty important bits of my car.”

Mulan laughs. “Oh, this is too good. Now, who would want to do a thing like that?”

Her list of suspects is pretty short. Mostly, it begins and ends with Henry, because she’s pretty sure Regina would charter a rocket ship to the moon if that was what was needed to get her out of the way. Other than that, she’s not sure anyone else has enough skin in the game to want to interfere with her car.

She doesn’t pass any of this on to Mulan. Instead, she shrugs and says, “You’re the professional. Figured you might have some ideas.”

“What’d they steal?”

“My spark plugs, apparently.”

Mulan frowns, appearing to consider the situation. “Regina, maybe?” She shakes her head without waiting for a reply from Emma. “No. If she was going to do anything, she’d set it on fire.”

“You’re probably right about that.” She was honestly surprised Regina hadn’t done exactly that while they’d been together. Regina had always hated The Bug and she’d offered more than once to buy Emma a new car, but giving up on The Bug would have felt a little too much like giving up a part of herself.

Mulan pulls out a notepad and a pen. “Do you want to file a report? I mean, I can check it out if you really want me to.”

“Honestly, no.

“You still driving that old scrap-heap?”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Just calling it as I see it.”

“Yeah? Well maybe I’ll have to beat your ass at pool and make you apologise.” Emma folds her arms and tries to look intimidating.

It doesn’t work, because Mulan starts laughing. “Any time.”

“When do you get off?”

“Are you really that eager to be humiliated?” Mulan asks and Emma smiles, because being destroyed by Mulan at the pool table genuinely sounds like one of the best things she could think of right now.

“Fine, I finish at eight. And I’m not going easy on you.”

*****

She’s walking down the main street when she spots it. She knows it’s Robin’s car, because no one else in Storybrooke would be ridiculous enough to drive a Smart car.

She’s kind of tempted to run a key along the door, but she’s also not exactly keen to spend time in the company of Storybrooke’s finest unless it’s in a dive bar with a pool table and she’s pretty sure she’d find her way onto the shortlist of suspects. And knowing Mulan she’d probably put her in a holding cell just for the hell of it and give her shit for hours. If she was particularly lucky, she’d be stuck in there with one of the more fragrant town drunks like Leroy or Killian.

She looks around quickly to see if anyone is watching her and consoles herself instead with tipping the last of her coffee onto the windscreen. It’s vaguely satisfying for a moment, but mostly she just feels hollow.

She keeps walking until she gets back to Granny’s and immediately gets a pointed look from the lady herself. “My coffee not good enough for you anymore? Got a taste for the fancy stuff off in Boston or New York or wherever it is you’ve been living?”

Emma realises she’s still holding the empty coffee cup. She probably should have disposed of the evidence, but her head’s not in the game at the moment.

She reflexively apologises, even though she’s not sure why. Somehow, Granny manages to make her (and everyone) feel a little bit like a misbehaving grandchild.

“Um… I’m gonna need that room for a couple more nights. Turns out my car’s not exactly going to be an easy fix.”

Granny raises an eyebrow and folds her arms and Emma feels even more like she’s about to be sent to bed without any supper. “You sure my humble establishment is up to your lofty standards?”

“Honestly, it’s probably the nicest place I’ve lived since I moved out of Regina’s house… Nicer than Regina’s. Definitely nicer,” she corrects herself when Granny’s eyebrow shoots up even further.

Granny’s face breaks into a smile. “I’m just ribbing you, girl. Of course the room’s there for you. Stay as long as you like. It’s not like Storybrooke’s become a tourist trap in the time you’ve been away.”

*****

She meets Mulan at the Rabbit Hole that evening and it’s like stepping back in time. The same regulars are there propping up the bar and the bartender’s already pouring her usual drink before she has a chance to ask for it.

There’s something a little comforting about the fact that as much as she’s tried to move forward, this part of the world has existed in a kind of suspended animation for the time that she’s been away. It makes her feel like a little less of a failure when she sees so many other people falling into the patterns they always have, but it also leaves her wondering just what it is she’ll have to do to move on.

Regina’s certainly had no trouble and that sobering thought has her knocking back her drink. The bartender raises an eyebrow and silently pours her another, which she quickly takes care of. When she starts to gesture for a third drink, Mulan grabs her arm.

“Slow down. I don’t want you to make this too easy for me,” Mulan says as she drags her towards the pool tables. “I mean, it’s going to be easy, but I’d like to pretend that I’m not basically stealing candy from a baby.”

“Hey! I’m good at pool.” She isn’t, but this has always been part of their ritual and it feels so easy, so comfortable sliding right back into this.

Mulan is true to her word, sinking the eight ball as Emma surveys her own mostly unsunk set of balls.

“How did you get so good at this?”

“Years of intensive training. I studied under great masters of the craft.”

Emma rolls her eyes at the obvious bullshit Mulan is spinning. “Seriously?”

“Fine. More like years of being single and terrible at picking up women. I’d always end up minding everyone’s stuff while they went off and danced so I spent a lot of time playing pool by myself.”

“Honestly, I don’t know how you’re so bad at that.” Emma looks at Mulan shakes her head. “I mean, objectively you’re hot.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way about me, Emma,” Mulan says a little too sweetly.

Emma chokes on her drink, not sure whether Mulan’s joking or not. Mulan doesn’t keep her in suspense for too long though. “Don’t worry, Emma. There’s not enough alcohol in Storybrooke to make me want to go there.”

“Gee, thanks,” Emma grumbles, and she can’t decide whether to be relieved or insulted by the decisiveness of Mulan’s rejection.

Mulan groans, the playfulness of a moment ago giving way to frustration. “I need to move to a city with more than six lesbians.”

“Six? When did the lesbian population of Storybrooke grow so large?”

“I’m pretty sure it hasn’t, but I’m trying out the power of positive thinking.”

“You could always come visit me and we could check out the talent in Boston.”

Mulan leans against her pool cue, looking a little too dejected for someone who just destroyed her at pool. “I’m not sure I could handle being rejected by another whole city’s lesbian population, but thank you for the offer.”

“Another game?” Emma asks, even though she’s not sure her dignity can take it. But it’s a good excuse to stay out and occupy herself with something other than sitting in her room at Granny’s thinking about Regina and Mulan seems like she could use a little more confidence-building.

“You’re that keen on a beating?

Emma shrugs. “Not like I’ve got anything else to do other than get humiliated by you.”

“I’ll play left-handed this time, make it an almost-fair fight.”

Mulan with her left hand proves to still be a formidable challenge and Emma is soundly beaten again. She puts her cue down and sighs.

“Okay, I yield.”

Mulan smirks. “What do you say?”

“Mulan is the mightiest warrior in the land,” Emma dutifully recites to Mulan’s satisfaction.

“You can buy me that drink now.”

Emma goes up to the bar and buys another round of drinks before they move over to a booth. They sit down and Mulan looks at her contemplatively for a while, the silence stretching out almost uncomfortably long.

“You know, I didn’t expect you to come back to Storybrooke.”

“Neither did I. I didn’t think there was anything for me to come back to.”

“Nothing at all?” Mulan asks and Emma’s surprised to hear a faintly wounded note in her voice.

“I didn’t mean it like that.” And she hadn’t. Mulan had been the first real friend she’d made in a long time, but when she’d walked away from Storybrooke it hadn’t occurred to her that her friendship might mean something similar to Mulan.

“There are people here who care about you. But I guess you’ve probably got plenty of that wherever it is you’re living now.”

Emma shakes her head. “Honestly, I haven’t really stopped anywhere long enough for that to happen. I mean, if I died next week in some kind of freak carbon monoxide poisoning accident in my apartment, the only person who’d notice would be my landlord when I didn’t make rent on time.”

“Are you still doing the same kind of work?”

“Yeah. Still chasing bad guys with a bit of PI work on the side.”

Mulan toys with her drink for a moment before looking up at Emma. “If you happened to feel like settling down again, I’ll have a deputy job going soon.”

She wasn’t expecting that and it’s a lot. Her first instinct is to refuse; being stuck in close proximity to Regina and watching her be happy without her sounds a lot like torture. But then there’s Henry and she thinks she could bear a lot just to be that little bit closer, to have a chance to watch him grow up.

Even with that, she shakes her head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. I mean, I’m pretty sure Regina wouldn’t be too pleased.”

“Is it really up to Regina, though?”

And Emma’s not sure she knows the answer to that, because in the end it all does come back to Regina and how Emma feels about her. She can only shrug helplessly and Mulan seems to accept that for now, because she doesn’t press any further.

“The offer’s there still there if you want to think about it a little more.”

“Thanks.” She’s not sure she will think about it any further, because thinking about it now makes her want everything she can’t have so desperately that she feels like she can’t breathe.


	4. Chapter 4

She hasn’t really felt connected to a place, to people, since she left Storybrooke. If she takes stock of the last three years, the best she can come up with is a bartender who almost knew her regular order by the time she moved on from one city and a neighbour who asked her to water her plants once in another city. Spoiler alert: the plants hadn’t done well and neither had her relationship with that neighbour.

She knows this isn’t her town anymore, but somehow, being back here is a feeling she’s not quite ready to let go of. She knows she could just get a bus back to Boston and come pick up her car in a few days when its ready, but there’s this incredible pull, like she’s standing in the ocean fighting a rip and she’s just as powerless as she would be fighting the strength of the waves.

Henry has snuck over to see her a couple of times, brief visits that have left her wanting more. Every moment she spends with him is a reminder of what she’s missed out on. She can’t believe he’s just about to start middle school and all too soon, he’ll be dating, himself, rather than taking an unwelcome interest in his mother’s and her respective love lives. He’s still trying to manipulate her into interfering with Regina’s upcoming wedding and she gently deflects each time he tries to raise some element or other of one of his schemes.

She sits on the edge of her bed, mulling things over. Part of her feels a little bit guilty for sticking around. She wonders if she’s getting Henry’s hopes up just by being here and when she leaves things will be worse than if she’d never come back. She’s not ready to let go of him again, though, and this time maybe she’ll have the courage to fight for her place in Henry’s life.

That’s a problem for later, though. Her stomach rumbles audibly reminding her that she hasn’t eaten yet today. After a big night out with Mulan, all she can think of is having the biggest, greasiest breakfast Granny is capable of creating, all at genuine 1980s prices. She pulls her boots on and then heads out the door with a sense of purpose. She can figure out everything else later, after she’s been fed.

She wanders down to the diner and she’s dreaming of immense stacks of bacon when she all but collides with Regina and Henry as she’s approaching the counter.

“Table for three?” Granny asks with a smirk that’s not even slightly innocent and Emma would be tempted to murder the old troublemaker if she wasn’t sure that the entire town would implode without her.

Emma shakes her head. “I’m here by myself. I was just gonna eat at the counter.”

“Well, I’ve only got one table free at the moment and the counter’s full. Business is booming, as you can see.”

Emma looks around the diner, which definitely doesn’t look full. She’s about to say so when Regina beats her to the punch.

“Hardly,” she says drily. “I count at least ten free tables.”

“They’re reserved,” Granny says primly.

“Since when do you take reservations?” Regina asks, her tone turning a little combative and Emma winces, because that way lies madness and vengefully overcooked eggs. She knows from experience that Granny doesn’t take kindly to criticisms or being challenged.

“Mom, can Emma have breakfast with us?” Henry’s obviously been waiting for an opportunity like this and when it presents itself, he’s not in the least bit shy about taking it.

Regina looks irritated for a moment and Emma rushes to defuse the situation, because she wants what remains of her sanity intact and her yolks runny. “It’s okay. I’ll just take my breakfast up to my room.”

“Mom…” Henry looks at Regina with wide, pleading eyes and Emma stifles a smile, because she knows there’s no way Regina’s going to be able to resist. Henry had her wrapped around his little finger from day one and even though he’s a good six inches taller and not nearly as cute, she’s still pretty sure that Regina’s just as susceptible as she’s always been.

She repeats her offer, as much as she wants to stay and hang out with Henry, but he’s already worked his magic on Regina.

“Fine.”

Granny smiles sweetly and gestures for them to follow her to a booth in the corner.

She’s not sure Regina would be pleased to know that she’s seen Henry in secret since she’s been here and a couple of times he almost slips up and says something that might give them away. Regina doesn’t seem to notice, though, and Emma breathes a sigh of relief.

Reading the menu is an excuse not to talk or to look at Regina, even though Emma’s known exactly what she was going to order before she even came down to the diner. She spends an extra long time pretending to decide and she suspects Regina’s doing exactly the same, when Emma already knows Regina’s just going to get a bagel and black coffee.

They order, and it’s exactly as Emma expects, right down to the judgmental look from Regina that she pretends not to notice when she orders extra bacon.

“I’m just gonna use the bathroom,” Henry says as the waitress walks away with their orders, and he slips out of the booth, pausing only to wink at Emma from behind Regina’s head.

She clenches her jaw, because knowing Henry, she suspects she and Regina are going to be here for quite some time and they no longer have the convenient shield of the diner’s oversized menus to protect them from conversation.

The silence stretches out to at least a minute and Emma tries to find something else to focus on other than Regina. She picks up the salt and pepper shakers and tries to balance one on top of the other. Unsuccessfully, as it turns out, because a moment later they’re crashing down onto the table and there’s salt spilling out across the table.

“Oh, will you stop that,” Regina snaps as she brushes a few grains of salt from the front of her dress. It’s a very nice dress that Emma has been trying her absolute hardest not to notice, but she’s also only human and Regina attractiveness is bordering on the inhumane.

“Surely we can be civilised about this,” Regina continues. “I mean, I’d like to think we could be friends.”

That’s easy for Regina to say. After all, she’s the one on the verge of getting re-married and she presumably hasn’t spent the last three years trying very unsuccessfully to forget about the person sitting on the opposite side of the table.

“Sure. I’d like that,” Emma says, forcing a smile even though it’s the last thing she wants. Friends means talking about things like what Regina’s wedding dress looks like and how wonderful Robin is and if she had to list things she’d enjoy doing, that would come in somewhere below having all of her internal organs removed with a particularly blunt spoon and no anaesthetic.

They sit there smiling – Emma as sincerely as she can manage, which is not very – the silence just as loaded as before.

“How’s your mother?” she finally says. It’s the kind of thing a friend might ask, she tells herself, although she regrets it as soon as it’s out of her mouth. She knows it’s a sore topic for Regina, but in her panicked attempt to cut through the awkwardness it was the first thing that came to mind.

Regina smiles sweetly and Emma knows her well enough to know it’s a shield she’s always used against vulnerability. “I’m sure she’d be delighted to know you’d asked after her. Perhaps you should drop by and have a cup of tea with her.” There’s a faint hint of venom in that reply and Emma tries not to wince.

“Only if she remembers I take my tea with milk, two sugars and no strychnine.” The younger Mills is far less adept in the ways of polite assassination than her mother; every conversation Emma had ever had with Cora felt like a knife dipped in poison delivered with a candy-sweet smile.

She gets a genuine laugh from Regina with that. “Just for you, I’m sure she’d bring out the Novichok. After all, you’re an honoured guest.” The smile is quick to dissipate, though. “No, my mother is exactly as awful as she’s always been. And she _hates_ Robin.”

That’s kind of gratifying to hear, although Emma instantly feels a flicker of guilt at that reaction, because she can only imagine just how miserable Cora is making Regina’s life in the lead-up to the wedding.

“Really? I would have thought she’d approve of him. After all, he’s not some gutter rat determined to get her hands on the family fortune.” She can’t help that last part. Cora had done her level best to get her out of Regina’s life from the moment she’d met her and even if her attempts hadn’t been successful, it hadn’t mattered in the end. If anything, she sometimes wonders if Cora’s interference had delayed the inevitable, Regina holding on to her with all the stubborn insolence she could muster.

“As if my mother, paid-up member of the Republican party that she is, would approve of someone I met while he was chained to a tree that was going to be bulldozed.”

 _Gross._ Everything she hears about him makes her hate him a little bit more. Mostly, because she can’t find anything specific to hate about him, except for the fact that it seems like he makes Regina happy and she probably never did.

Regina smiles wryly and continues, “No, if Mother had her way I’d be married to some geriatric Senator with an enormous oil empire. But between you and Robin, honestly, I think she’d prefer I was still married to you.”

“Somehow I doubt that.” Based on everything Cora had ever said to her or about her, Emma’s pretty sure that Hannibal Lecter would have been higher on Cora’s list of suitable spouses for Regina. At least Hannibal Lecter was a doctor, after all.

“I wasn’t suggesting that she liked you. She saw you as a worthy opponent; you didn’t give an inch, no matter what she tried.”

“And Robin isn’t?”

“He’s so focused on trying to get her to like him that he doesn’t see what she’s doing.” There’s a kind of nascent frustration in Regina’s voice and she wonders if it’s at Robin, her mother or both. It’s the first sign she’s had that maybe not everything’s as rosy as she’d believed it to be.

She thinks about pushing Regina on that point–after all, they’re supposed to be friends, aren’t they?–but she knows her motives wouldn’t be pure. No, she’s not going to get involved, even though it seems like Regina’s given her an opening to do just that.

Instead, she decides to turn to the other topic she’s interested in, one that’s likely to be a bit safer. “I didn’t really get a chance to ask you before, but how’s Henry doing?”

“He’s been doing a lot better.”

 _Better?_ Regina says it like she’s supposed to understand what that means, like she knows anything about what’s gone on with Henry for the past three years.

Regina must see the confusion on her face, because a moment later she fills in some of the blanks. “It took him a while to adjust to things changing and he acted out a bit. Things like skipping school, tantrums and he tried to run away once before, back when we were in Vancouver. I honestly thought he was past that, but then he ran away again to you.”

“I think he hoped that if I came back here…” she trails off, not willing to spell things out because she’s afraid she might give something about her feelings away, but not entirely comfortable hiding this rather significant detail from Regina either. 

It only takes a moment for understanding to dawn in Regina’s eyes. “Oh.”

“I told him it wasn’t happening.”

There’s a tight smile in response to that. “Thank you. I guess I need to have a talk with him about a few things.”

Emma clears her throat. “Speaking of Henry, where is he?”

He’s been gone for an awfully long time and Emma’s at the point where she needs some kind of buffer to keep her from blundering into saying something more than she should. As it is, she worries that she’s been anything but poker-faced over the last few minutes.

Emma spots him next to the jukebox where he’s crouched down, doing his best not to be spotted while he watches their conversation. She rolls her eyes, because if he’s going to pretend to be a spy he should make sure he’s not wearing a particularly conspicuous scarf that’s currently caught on part of the jukebox.

Maybe she’ll teach him how to do this stuff for real, she thinks for a moment, before remembering that it’s not her place to do that and as soon as her car’s fixed, she won’t be a part of his life again. It hurts, because she should be around to teach him a lot of things, like how to talk to girls and the best music to listen to on a stakeout and how to always win at pool and okay, maybe not that last one.

She points him out and Regina heads over there, appearing to exchange a few stern words with him before bringing him back to the table. In the time she’s gone, their breakfast arrives and it’s a welcome distraction. She can focus on eggs and bacon and curing her hangover and try to entirely forget about weddings and heartbreak for a few delicious minutes.

She hasn’t quite finished her breakfast when Robin shows up, apologising for not being able to find his car keys, but suddenly the stack of bacon left on her plate is looking decidedly less appetising. Henry winks at her from across the table and she sighs, because obviously Robin’s keys had a little assistance with their disappearing act. When Robin very obviously gestures at Henry to move so that he can sit next to Regina, Henry folds his arms and does his best impression of a statue. And okay, maybe Emma’s a little tickled by that, but it also means that if she doesn’t make a quick exit, Robin’s going to end up sitting next to her.

She weighs up the pros and cons. On the pro side, he’s in perfect range to stab in the leg with a fork. On the con side, he exists, he’s breathing the same air as her and his face is even more punchable this close up. Only, she doesn’t have a good reason for doing any of those things and the longer she stays, the worse she’s going to feel about herself and this whole shitty situation. She stands up abruptly, not at all interested in sticking around any longer.

Henry looks like he’s about to start something, but she shakes her head. “See you round, kid.” To Regina, she says, “Thanks for the company,” and she almost kind of means it, but the smile she gets in return suggests Regina’s well aware that she’s lying.


	5. Chapter 5

Zelena is exactly as annoying as Emma remembers. She’s also, if it’s even possible, more conniving than she had been back then.

She’s pretty sure Zelena’s the one who stole her spark plugs and then paid off the only mechanic in town to mysteriously not be able to get a hold of any replacements for close to a week. At first she’d been sure it was Henry, but as far as she’s aware he doesn’t have either the disposable income or the dirt to bribe or blackmail his way to wholesale sabotage of her car.

Every day, she’d gone down to see about The Bug being fixed, and every day Billy had shaken his head. One of the times she’d been to the garage, she could have sworn she’d caught sight of a brand new set of spark plugs on the workshop shelves, but he’d muttered something about them being a defective set he needed to send back to the manufacturer which she was 99.9% sure was total bullshit.

She’s also not entirely sure how Zelena talked her into this, this being Regina’s bachelorette day activities, or why Regina had actually seemed almost happy to have her there. Zelena had insisted that they needed even numbers for some activity or other and made some vague statement about every other woman in Storybrooke simultaneously falling victim to some sort of horrible form of gastro. She’d also implied that she might be able to help Emma out with her spark plug situation and that had been enough to get Emma to play along for at least a little while.

They’re on a scavenger hunt that so far has delivered very little except sore feet, some vaguely pornographic playing cards with clues written on them, alcohol and a lot of awkward feelings on Emma’s part. Mostly, Emma has just tried to stay out of the way, but somewhere along the line, the party’s been split and it’s just her, Zelena and Regina at the moment. Marian, Kathryn and Mary Margaret are nowhere to be seen, and Emma’s missing having a couple of other people as a buffer between her and Regina, even though she’d spent a lot of the day fending off increasingly nosy questions from Mary Margaret.

“Looks like our next stop is in here.” Zelena gestures towards a ramshackle cabin that isn’t much more than a falling-down shed.

Regina walks ahead to inspect the cabin, but Emma hangs back. She’s decided that there’s a limit to the amount of awkwardness she can handle and she’s gone way past it already. She turns to walk back towards the trail, but Zelena’s beside her in an instant.

“If you’re thinking of leaving, I wouldn’t if I were you. I suspect something terrible might happen to that beloved car of yours. Something terrible involving a car compactor, perhaps.”

Emma narrows her eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Zelena asks, letting out a tinkling laugh that chills Emma to her bones. She knows Zelena’s just crazy enough to follow through on her threats.

“I _want_ my spark plugs back,” Emma says, with as much steel in her voice as she can muster.

“What’s a spark plug?” Zelena asks, her face a picture of feigned innocence.

“Zelena…”

“Perhaps it’ll come back to me in a few more hours,” Zelena says sweetly. She links her arm through Emma’s and all but frog-marches her back towards the cabin, which Regina has already gone into.

“Why do you even want me here?” She can’t help but be more than a little suspicious of Zelena’s motives and she’s starting to think, car or not, that she should have said no to this whole thing. Zelena’s relationship with Regina has always been unpredictable; for a time, she’d been hell-bent on tearing down everything Regina built in her life, but eventually they’d settled into something a little more conventional.

Presumably these days they’re on better terms, with Zelena being maid of honour in the wedding party, but with Zelena you can never be too sure. Knowing this, Emma still can’t help but wonder if her presence is an element in one of Zelena’s plans to fuck everything up.

“What an interesting question,” Zelena says. “Well, the truth is…”

Emma’s still waiting for the answer when Zelena gives her a shove. She trips through the door of the cabin, almost colliding with Regina, steadying herself just in time to turn and see the door slamming shut behind her.

“What the hell?” From the other side, she can hear Zelena cackling wildly and Emma’s suddenly left with the very distinct feeling that this is a set-up.

She takes the couple of steps back to the door and tries to open it. “It’s locked.”

“Let me try.” Regina nudges her aside with her shoulder and rattles the door handle with exactly as much success as Emma had a moment earlier.

“Told you so,” Emma says, and she doesn’t mean for it to come out sounding smug but it does anyway.

Regina sighs and looks about as pleased as she might if someone had pissed in her Cornflakes. Emma’s caught between a desire to laugh and a nagging instinct to try and do everything she can to make Regina smile again. After all this time, Emma still has an instinctual need to please her, but she tries to ignore it and instead takes stock of their surroundings.

She looks around the cabin; it’s sparsely-decorated and there’s a noticeable layer of dust on what little furniture there is. The windows all have bars on them that not even a small child could fit through and it doesn’t look like there’s another door to get out either. She pulls out her cell phone in the faint hope that maybe she’s got at least one bar, unlike when she’d checked a few minutes ago. She doesn’t and judging by the irritated noise Regina makes before shoving her cell phone back into her bag, neither does she.

It looks like they’re stuck. She sighs, because if Zelena was going to lock them in somewhere, it could at least have been a bit more comfortable. The only seat in the room is a love seat that’s clearly not meant to seat any more than one person, or two people who are particularly fond of each other, which certainly isn’t the case here. Regina takes the seat and Emma sits on the floor, leaning against the wall opposite her.

There’s a bottle of scotch and two tumblers on the side table next to the sofa that Emma hadn’t noticed. Regina picks it up and pours herself a very generous measure.

“You gonna pour me one?” Emma asks.

Regina ignores her for a moment, downing a large gulp of her drink before topping her glass back up.

“You know I didn’t ask for this, right?” Emma says, a little pissed that Regina’s treating her like this when she hadn’t really done anything to deserve it.

“Neither did I,” Regina says. Finally, she leans over and slides the bottle and a glass across the floor and Emma receives them gratefully. She pours herself at least as much as Regina had and tips her glass in acknowledgement before knocking half of it back in one go. She coughs a little – it’s not exactly the smoothest stuff, but she’d honestly drink pretty much anything right now to try and make this whole thing a little less excruciating than it promises to be. 

“I’m going to kill Zelena.”

Regina snorts, gracelessly. “Get in line. She’s _my_ sister, so I get the first shot.”

“I mean, what did she think she was going to accomplish with this?”

“You know as much as I do,” Regina says, before they fall back into an awkward silence.

Emma gulps down most of the rest of her drink and wonders whether it’s actually possible for a human being to melt through the floorboards. Regina would probably know; she’d probably say something or other about constituent atoms and a bunch of other complicated chemistry professor stuff that would go straight over Emma’s head.

It felt like they’d reached a kind of truce at breakfast the other day. Not that there had ever really been any active hostilities so much as the kind of Arctic winter that would have had polar bears rejoicing. The other day had been the first hint of a thawing in an ice wall that had seemed impenetrable.

She watches Regina carefully; she seems like she’s fighting with herself, about to say something and then stopping. Eventually, whatever internal battle she’s fighting comes to a close. “What happened to us, Emma?” she asks.

Emma thinks about the question for a long moment, has thought about it for a lot more moments before now, and there are so many things she could say. _You didn’t love me_ , or _I wasn’t enough_ , or a thousand other things just like that. She doesn’t say any of those things, though, instead trying to stay matter of fact. “You decided to leave and go to the one place I couldn’t follow.”

“That’s not quite how I remember it.”

“How do you remember it, then?” Emma challenges her.

“I don’t know. Maybe I was hoping you’d ask me to stay,” Regina says, a wry smile twisting her mouth.

“Yeah? I guess I didn’t really think that was an option. I mean, you married me to annoy your mother and I always figured you’d wake up one day and realise the mistake you’d made.” Her resolve of a moment ago is out the window and Emma hugs her knees to her chest and leans her chin on them, her eyes closed, because it hurts too much to look at Regina and think about everything she’d lost. “And then you did,” she says quietly.

She opens her eyes again when she feels Regina slide down the wall to sit awkwardly next to her on the floor.

“It didn’t feel like a mistake.”

“And yet, you took a job in the one place in the world I couldn’t go.”

“It wasn’t like that. It was just a job offer. And,” Regina hesitates before saying, “I’d forgotten that you told me you were deported from Canada.”

It’s a lie. She knows it from the way Regina doesn’t quite look at her when she says it.

It’s true that she’d mentioned the Canada thing once, off-hand, in the kind of conversation you have when you’re filling in the blank spaces, building a portrait of someone who’s still only a line drawing to you. And they never really talked about it after that. But she’s always been good at knowing when Regina’s lying to her and right now she’s sure of it.

“Yeah?” She thinks about leaving it at that, but she’s never really given herself a chance to air her grievances and maybe this is the last shot she’ll ever have. Keeping her mouth shut hasn’t helped her so far, so maybe it’s time to change that. “That’s total bullshit.”

Regina flinches a little at her tone, then meets her eyes and this time Emma knows she’ll be getting the truth. “You’re right. I did know. But it seemed like you had one foot out the door. Those last few months in particular, you were almost never home and it seemed like you trying to find excuses to get away.”

And to a certain extent, she had been. She _had_ accepted jobs that would take her further away, give her more time to think, to breathe, because it felt like Regina was slipping away from her and she couldn’t quite bring herself to stay and watch that happen. Better to find some distance sooner rather than later, because maybe that way it would hurt less. It hadn’t, though.

“You know that was part of my job. Besides, you never said anything.” She shakes her head, wondering at how they ended up in this place, so completely unaware of each other’s needs. “I could have changed things, found something else to do.”

“I didn’t think you wanted to stay. And I didn’t want to stop you from doing something you loved.”

“I didn’t love my job. I…” She wants to say _I loved you_ but even that pretence at putting things in past tense feels too close to stepping over a line that’s not hers to cross.

“Why _didn’t_ you fight for us, Emma?” Now Regina seems angry too. “One day I’m talking about a hypothetical job and the next day you’re walking out the front door with a duffel bag in your hand.”

She shrugs, trying to seem more casual about things than she really feels. “It was a good career move for you,” she says softly, a line she’d rehearsed to herself a thousand times. “And besides, what was there to fight for? I mean, I always knew I didn’t fit into your life or your plans. You had Henry, you had your career and I was just this strange add-on you picked up on a whim. I remember going to one of those conference dinners with you and everyone looking at me wondering what I was doing there and more to the point, what I was doing with you.”

“Emma… You were there because I wanted you to be there.”

“But they were laughing at me. And if they were laughing at me, that means they were laughing at you too.”

Regina shrugs. “Like I really ever cared what that bunch of dinosaurs think of me.”

“You say that, but I know that’s not true.” She knows it’s not true, because the first night they’d met Regina had been a tangle of frustration and resentment and those same dinosaurs had been the cause.

“Maybe, but that doesn’t matter now and it didn’t matter then,” Regina says.

She doesn’t quite know what to make of that statement. There’s something in her words, in her tone of voice that has Emma questioning things. She looks down, searching for answers in her half-empty glass, but there’s nothing in there but whiskey.

When she looks up she finds Regina watching her with a focus that reminds her of the first time she’d met her. She’d been working a job at a casino, posing as a blackjack dealer and Regina had spent most of the night hanging around her table watching proceedings with an unwavering intensity that had her wondering if she was a card counter.

_“Can I deal you in,” she said, hoping that if she was a card counter, it might be enough to deter her before security happened to come by. And, at the very least, it might help her focus her attention back on the job she was supposed to be doing._

_Blackjack wasn’t exactly a spectator sport, not like the roulette wheel, so she tended to notice anyone hanging around the table. But even if she’d been spinning a roulette wheel, with a crowd of people watching, she knew her eyes would have been drawn straight to Regina._

_Every time she looked up she found Regina’s eyes on her. It seemed impossible that someone like Regina would be interested in someone like her, but Regina played hand after hand, seeming less concerned about the outcomes of the game than the person dealing those cards to her._

_The end of her shift came and her replacement took over the table._

_“Do you want to get a drink with me?” Regina asked, following her away from the table. By Emma’s reckoning, she had to have been down at least a couple of hundred at that point and it seemed like winning at Blackjack was not her first priority._

_Emma looked pointedly at the plain gold band on Regina’s finger. “You’re married.” She’d noticed it as soon she’d dealt her into the game._

_She shook her head. “I’m not. I’ve just spent the last two days at a conference as one of the only senior women in my field.” She held up her hand and said, “This is vital protection.”_

_Emma smiled. There was a similar band tucked away in her pocket that she used to ward off unwanted attention when she was working. She’d forgotten to put it on before she started her shift today and maybe that was a moment of good fortune._

_“Why not?”_

_There were probably plenty of reasons why it was a bad idea, but none of them seemed to want to come to mind. Regina had looked at her in way that made her want to say yes to just about anything and she pretty much_ had _that night. One drink turned into many and the night had ended with a different ring on her finger, not the faithful silver band that had served her so well over the years._

Regina’s looking at her that way now, in a way that has Emma’s stomach tying itself in the kind of knots that would earn her a girl scout merit badge. Or maybe Regina would technically be the one earning the badge if she’s the one responsible for the knots. It’s a stupid thought and she tries to hang onto it to distract herself from the fact that Regina looks an awful lot like she’s thinking about leaning in and kissing her right now.

Regina leans forward a little, the neck of her blouse gapping open a little, and for a moment she swears she catches a glimpse of a silver band on the chain around her neck and suddenly everything Emma’s ever believed feels like a puzzle that’s been thrown in the air and come down in a thousand jumbled pieces.

She gulps down the rest of her whiskey and tries to figure out what she should do, if indeed, Regina does fulfil the promise that look seems to be making, because as much as she’s dreamed of this it’s arriving in a way she’d never quite expected. Even if there really is a familiar silver band hiding below that blouse, there’s also another ring on Regina’s finger, one that Emma hadn’t given her and that still means something even if she wishes it didn’t.

She’s saved from having to make a decision by the sound of the door unlocking. When she and Regina look up, they’re met with the sight of Marian tumbling through the now-open door with Zelena trying to put her in a headlock.

Marian groans, clearly a little winded, eventually gasping out, “Sorry. Didn’t realise what she’d done. Came as soon as I did.”

Regina pushes up off the wall and Emma can pretty much see her vibrating with anger. Zelena looks smug for a moment, but then Regina’s focus is fixed on her and Emma knows from experience just how formidable she can be.

With Regina’s attention completely focused on the task of chewing out her ridiculous sister, Emma takes the opportunity to make a quick getaway.


	6. Chapter 6

She’s walking – or limping, rather – down a street on the outskirts of Storybrooke when Mulan pulls up beside her and winds down the window. Cell reception could be pretty patchy outside of town and she’d had to walk quite a way back to town before she could attempt to summon Mulan to come to her rescue.

“Get in.”

Emma pretends to flutter her eyelashes. “My knight in a beat-up Ford Crown.”

“Should I ask why you’re hiking halfway across the countryside of Maine dressed like that?”

Emma sighs. “Regina’s bachelorette party.”

“You actually went to that? Are you insane? Why would you even do that to yourself?” She’d mentioned off-hand to Mulan that Zelena had invited to her, but not actually told her she was going. With the benefit of hindsight and a five-mile hike back into town, she’s realised that actually agreeing to go was the very definition of stupid.

Still, there _was_ the small matter of the fate of her car hanging in the balance and she says as much to Mulan. “Zelena kind of hinted to me that she might know something about my spark plugs.” It sounds even stupider when she says it out loud, and Mulan’s sceptical response doesn’t really help matters.

“Mmm-hmm. And?”

“And…”

Mulan looks at her expectantly and Emma’s not sure what she wants her to say.

“What do you want?” she asks.

Mulan shakes her head. “That’s my question to you. What do _you_ want? What were you hoping to get out of today?”

If she’s honest, she’s not even really sure why she went today. She thinks for a minute and stumbles on an idea that seems like it might be something nearing the truth. “I guess I just wanted some kind of closure.”

It sounds right when she says it and she thinks that maybe seeing Regina happy and preparing for her wedding was supposed to be the thing that finally killed whatever feelings she had left for her.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

She shakes her head. All she’d found was a whole lot of confusion, mixed in with a dash of temptation, and after all of that she’s not sure where she stands with Regina. Except, there’s a wedding that’s a week away and that really kind of says it all.

“Honestly, I just want to go to a bar and get drunk enough to forget that any part of today actually happened.”

Mulan looks at her with obvious concern. “You know, that doesn’t sound like the greatest idea. What if I just dropped you back at Granny’s?”

“I’d walk to the nearest bar anyway and I’d probably bleed to death from my already-blistered feet, just because you made me walk there. And then you’d feel really, really guilty.”

Mulan sighs. “Alright. I have an hour left of my shift, so if you’re willing to wait I’ll come with you.”

“Can you do your paperwork at the bar?”

“No.”

They get back to the station and Emma entertains herself for a while shooting pretend baskets with Mulan’s wastepaper basket and some forms she’s supposed to be filling out.

“You know, you’d make a perfect deputy. You’re already a pro at both wastepaper basketball _and_ annoying the crap out of me.”

Mulan finally finishes her paperwork, after Emma’s racked up an all-time Storybrooke Sheriff Department record for number of baskets in a row and they head to the Rabbit Hole.

The bartender’s already pouring their drinks when they walk up to the bar and when she signals to make it a double there’s no surprise or judgment there.

“What happened today?” Mulan asks as they find a table.

_Everything._

“Regina and I talked about a few things. It was good to clear the air a bit. And…” she hesitates, because she hasn’t even got it straight in her own mind, “And there was a moment where I kind of wondered if she was going to kiss me.”

Mulan’s eyebrows shoot up at that last part. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t want to be selfish. What if she’s happy with him?”

Mulan snorts. “No one would be happy waking up to that face for the rest of their life.”

She manages a weak smile at that, but it’s not enough to cheer her up. She knows what she has to do. She’s known the whole time she’s been back in Storybrooke, and nothing that happened today should change that.

“I…”

There’s something of a commotion at the entrance to the bar and then a moment later, she hears Zelena, shrill as ever. “Lock up your tequila, peasants. The party has arrived.”

Emma groans. It seems the bachelorette party has made its way to the exact spot Emma was planning to spend the next few hours drowning in scotch and self-pity. She makes a strategic retreat to the bathroom while she decides how she’s going to get out of here without running into any of them.

Honestly, she’s surprised the party’s made it this far into the night, even though it’s still early. She would have expected Regina to have blown Zelena into a thousand tiny pieces after the stunt she’d pulled earlier.

She’s just about to check if the coast is clear and make her way out of the bathroom (and probably straight out of the bar) when Regina walks in. There’s a moment when Emma can see her and Regina can’t and there’s a frantic swirl of ideas in her head about how she might escape. They all come to nothing, because then Regina sees Emma and all of a sudden her face is a study in a dozen expressions over the course of a few seconds.

She settles on anger, or something like it, and then she’s advancing across the room with a kind of predatory intent and Emma has no idea what to do or how to escape.

“Why did you have to come back?” Regina hisses, right into Emma’s ear. She’s close, so close, and it’s all Emma can do to hold herself up, hands gripping the edge of the bathroom counter tightly while she wonders if her knees will give way.

It’s been a long time since anyone has been this close and even longer since it was Regina. Surely three years should have been enough to dull the instinctual want that flares up.

It should have been, but it’s not, and then Regina’s voice turns husky and Emma feels like she’s on the edge of a precipice and if she falls she’ll be lost. “I miss your hands, I miss your mouth, I miss the way you make me feel,” Regina says, and her voice is like a shot of overproof liquor, burning her through.

For a moment she feels a little bit smug at hearing that, but just for a moment, because she also can’t forget that she won’t be going home with Regina tonight. They won’t be tripping up the stairs, trying and failing to be quiet so as not to wake Henry, as they try to find a way to make it to the bedroom without taking their hands off each other for even a moment.

It’ll be someone else waking up with her and laughing over bacon and eggs in the morning and kissing her goodbye when she goes to work.

But there’s also the part where this is Regina and giving into this would be as natural as breathing. They’ve always been good together and her body remembers, even if her brain is telling her not to.

And that, right there, has always been the problem. Their relationship has always been built around sex–all action and no talk–and she thinks it was probably inevitable that they’d burn out so quickly. This isn’t what she wants; she wants the rare quiet nights where it felt like maybe they could mean something to each other.

She doesn’t want to wake up tomorrow, her body sated but her heart empty, with a thousand regrets jostling for position at the forefront of her mind.

She gently pushes Regina away, shaking her head, even though she’s never been good at saying no to Regina.

She remembers that first night, how well they’d fit, and how surprisingly easy the jump from one-night stand to a stupidly-impulsive Vegas wedding had felt.

_“My mother always wanted me to wait until marriage to have sex.”_

_A terrible, improbable thought crossed Emma’s mind and she paused, fingers hooked into the sides of Regina’s panties. “You’re not…”_

_Regina scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I mean, it has been a while, but certainly not. Although, perhaps for my dear old Mother’s sake, we_ should _get married.”_

_“Now?”_

_“Oh no. I most definitely believe in marriage_ after _sex.”_

_“Good,” Emma said and that was just about as much talking as she was interested in doing._

_She remembered something Regina had said earlier, at the bar._ “I’ve spent most of the last three days in a room full of men who have mentally undressed me, dressed me down, or otherwise belittled me.”

_There was something in that, a need Emma couldn’t let go unanswered, so she sank to her knees and spent the next little while building Regina back up again._

There’s something in the way Regina’s looking at her now, a different kind of desperation that almost makes her waver in her determination, but she holds firm because nothing good will come of something like this.

“We can’t do this, Regina. Not like this.”

“Why not?” she asks, even though Emma can see that she’s already on her way to accepting her refusal. The intensity of a moment ago has slipped away and now Regina just seems small and sad and lost.

“I don’t want to be a toy you pick up and play with when you’re bored of Robin.”

“That’s not what I was asking.” Regina shakes her head. “Honestly, I don’t know what I was asking.”

“You know, we’ve always been good at sex and nothing else and that’s not what I want. I always wanted more than that, but it seems like that was all you ever wanted from me.”

“Emma, the truth is, I don’t know how to love very well,” Regina admits and it’s confirmation of everything Emma had ever believed, except not in the way Regina had intended it.

“You know, if it was just me, I might be willing to agree with that. But I’ve seen the way you are with Henry–the way he is with you–and I know that’s not true.” She pauses for a moment, trying not to let the magnitude of her hurt creep through into her voice.

“The truth is, you don’t– _didn’t_ –love me. _Couldn’t_ love me.” Just like every other family that had walked past her and judged her unworthy.

“Emma…”

“I’m okay, or I’ve learned to be. And I’m glad that Henry has this. I’m glad he has you.”

She slips out, leaving Regina leaning over the basin and makes a beeline for the exit. She thinks about swinging by the table and telling Mulan what’s going on, but she needs to get out of here right now and she figures she can apologise later.

She’s held up for a moment near the front door by Zelena grabbing her arm, but she shrugs her off, not willing to play nice for once in her life.

“Fuck off, Zelena. Not now.”

Zelena follows her out of the bar and Emma wonders just what she’s going to have to do to get rid of her.

“She’s not over you,” Zelena calls out and it’s almost enough to make her stop dead in her tracks. But tonight she’s being strong, so she pretends she doesn’t hear and keeps walking.

When she gets back to her room, though, she finally breaks down. Today has been far too much.


	7. Chapter 7

Emma scuffs her feet on the doormat, trying to build up the courage to ring the doorbell. She’d spent most of the night thinking things through and she knows she can’t avoid this any longer. She finally talks herself into it after talking herself out of it more than once. Zelena’s words had played on her mind all night and even now she’s wondering whether this is the right thing to do.

She raises a hand, hesitates and then finally rings the doorbell. She’s waiting a while before Regina opens the door, squinting a little as she looks at Emma. She can tell that Regina’s night probably involved at least as much alcohol as hers and then some, based on the slightly pained look she’s giving her.

“Emma?”

“Hey Regina,” she says softly. “Looks like it was a big night.”

Regina self-consciously straightens her hair and Emma thinks it’s utterly unfair that even after a night like that, Regina’s still impossibly attractive. She wonders how she’d ever been stupid enough to think she had a chance for something real with her.

She’s been fidgeting with the envelope the whole time she’s been standing there, because even though she’s made up her mind, actually going through with things feels like a monumental task. She takes a deep breath and decides it’s time she rips the band-aid off.

“I’m sorry. I should have signed these a long time ago.” She holds the envelope out to Regina, who takes it with a look of faint bemusement that Emma can only attribute to her hangover.

It’s done.

It’s done and she’s not sure how to feel right now. Something that she’s built up as an impossible challenge for the past three years and it’s over with a few pen-strokes. Maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe it means she’s finally ready to move on.

Regina hasn’t moved, is still holding the envelope as if its existence mystifies her.

“I’ll get out of your hair now.”

She turns and walks down the driveway, back to the street where she’s parked and manages to convince herself not to look back. It’s better that she doesn’t see Regina continuing with her life as if nothing has really happened.

She leans against the car she’d borrowed from Mulan, glad that she’s parked out here where Regina can’t see her from the house. It’s finally starting to hit her that she’s called time on the most significant relationship of her life.

“Emma, wait!”

There’s a flicker of hope but it’s extinguished a moment later when Regina comes running down the driveway with a garbage bag in her hand.

“Zelena told me what she did and I got your spark plugs back. And I found this in Henry’s room. I don’t know what it does, but I thought it might belong to you. I was going to bring them by later.”

Emma manages a smile of thanks, even though this feels a lot like an ending. For real, this time. She peers into the bag and it looks like half the insides of her car are in there. She should have known that Henry’s meddling wouldn’t have ended with bringing her to town.

She hesitates for a moment, then asks, “Is Henry home at the moment?”

Regina nods. “In his room. He’s grounded until he’s seventy for everything he’s done recently.”

“Do you mind if I talk to him?”

Regina shakes her head and gestures for her to follow her back to the house. Emma looks down at the driveway as she walks alongside Regina. They don’t talk; as far as Emma’s concerned, there’s nothing left to say.

She heads up the stairs, not even really having to think about the way to Henry’s room. There’s a moment of muscle memory where she stops at their– _no_ , _Regina’s_ –bedroom to toss her jacket onto the bed. Pausing in the doorway, she can see a garment bag laid out on the bed and she knows even without walking in there that it must be the wedding dress. There’s an impulse welling up that she does her best to quash, a sudden desire to walk in there and tear it to pieces. She hovers there for a moment, fighting a silent war with herself, before finally continuing down the hall to Henry’s bedroom.

The door’s ajar. She knocks gently before entering. “Hey, kid.”

Henry looks up from the video game he’s playing.

“I just wanted to stop by and say goodbye. Looks like I’ll be heading back to Boston in the morning.”

“Screw you.”

“Henry…” She hadn’t expected him to be this angry, but maybe she should have. “Henry, what’s wrong?”

“You’re leaving again, just like you did before.”

Emma sighs. “You know I kind of didn’t have a choice, kid. Not then, and not now.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Regina’s your Mom and when it comes to you, what she says goes. I respect that.” She hadn’t always wanted to respect that. She’d dreamed up all sorts of ideas for how she might get around that and keep seeing Henry. But in the end, she’d decided that stability was important and to do anything to jeopardise that would have been unforgivable.

“You were my Mom too… Or, you were supposed to be.”

That hurts. It hurts, because it’s something she’d never quite allowed herself to completely want. She’d always been conscious that Henry was Regina’s son and that she was a guest in that relationship only as long as Regina tolerated her presence. And of course, it hadn’t been long before her presence had become unwelcome and any hope, any pretence that maybe she and Regina and Henry could be a real family had been irreparably shattered.

And at the end of the day, what did she really think she could give to Henry that Regina couldn’t. She’d never had a family, never known what it was like, no matter how many times she’d wished for some kind of fairy godmother to sweep her up in a swirl of fairy dust and transplant her into a ready-made loving home. She didn’t know how to raise a kid, so who had she been trying to fool?

She sits down next to him on his bed and picks up the spare controller. “You mind if I play with you?”

He makes a noise that she chooses to interpret as permission and she presses the start button on her controller. It’s a fighting game and she’s not particularly optimistic that she’s going to walk away with much of her dignity intact, but she figures it’s all in the name of a good cause.

She hasn’t exactly gotten better at video games in the last three years and Henry definitely has. There was a time when he’d go a little easy on her, but even though she doesn’t know the controls for this game, he’s ruthlessly efficient in dispatching her.

“Can I see what the controls are?”

He shakes his head, starting the next match immediately and she’s left to mash the buttons fruitlessly for another round of combat.

“Feel better?”

“Not yet.”

They go through the same routine a few more times, before Emma finally manages to land a couple of hits. She still loses but Henry looks at her with grudging respect.

She puts the controller down, hoping that after thoroughly embarrassing her for the last half hour, Henry might be a little more receptive to a conversation. She’s long overdue talking to him about the breakup and what had happened afterwards and it seems like now is the best chance she’s got to clear the air.

“Henry, I want to talk to you about when your mom and I broke up.”

“What’s there to talk about? You left and Mom took me away and didn’t let me see you.”

“Were you angry with her?”

“I was pretty pissed for a while. I’m over it now,” he says a little too casually and she suspects that no matter what he says, he’s still holding on to it on some level. She feels a pang of guilt that even inadvertently she’d made Regina into the bad guy. Even though she’s three years too late, she knows she still needs to put things right.

“Kid, the truth is I didn’t ask your mom for access to you.”

“Didn’t you want to see me?” She flinches at the betrayal in his voice, even though it’s exactly what she deserves.

“Desperately. I thought about you all the time, wondered what you were up to. But I thought it would be easier for you if I didn’t drag things out. And,” she swallows against the lump in her throat, “and the truth is, it was easier for me. I was hurting and I didn’t know how to deal with any of it so I guess I just decided not to.”

He sits beside her silently and when she steals a glance at him, his lips are pressed together in a thin, firm line.

“I realise that was wrong. I’m sorry, kid.”

“I always thought you were brave. You’d tell me stories about catching bad guys, about all the cool stuff you did and I used to think you could fight anything in the world. But you’re not brave. You’re a coward.”

It hurts, but she can’t argue with his characterisation of her behaviour. “You’re right.” She’ll own her mistakes and this one is probably her biggest.

“I always thought you’d come back for me. I kept hoping and hoping, but you never came,” he says, his voice cracking a little.

“Oh kid, I want you to know that I’ve never stopped loving you. I’ve missed you so much and I want to do things differently now I’ve got a second chance.”

She tentatively puts an arm around his shoulder, expecting him to pull away, and her heart glues itself back together and grows about ten sizes when he leans into the hug. Maybe things aren’t completely broken.

They sit there in silence, leaning against each other and it’s honestly the most she’s felt in a long time. After a while, Henry asks, “Why didn’t you and Mom work out? I mean, you loved her, didn’t you?”

She smiles ruefully as she considers the question. _Of course_ she had. She still does, even though she can’t admit that to Henry, because she knows it would only get his hopes up. “Sometimes love isn’t enough. Your mom and I kind of rushed into things–” _that’s the understatement of the century_ –“and I guess we didn’t really know enough about each other to make it work. Maybe it was never going to work.” She shakes her head. “Honestly, I don’t know, kid.”

“And she loved you.”

Emma shrugs, because she’s never really been sure of that. “I like to think so,” she says, as diplomatically as she can manage.

“I _know_ she did. She cried for months after you left. And she used to sleep in that old Star Trek t-shirt you left behind.”

She’d wondered where that had gone. It’s all academic now, though. “None of that really matters anymore. Your mom’s getting married next weekend.”

“We can still stop it. I’ve got a plan. Operation White Dove,” he says, suddenly filled with purpose again.

“Henry, no,” she says, as firmly as she can. She hates to think what kind of scheme he’s been cooking up. “Promise me you won’t do anything to mess up the wedding.”

“Why not? You still love her, don’t you? That’s why you stayed around.”

She rolls her eyes. “I stayed around because you and your Aunt Zelena stole most of the important bits of my car.”

“I call bullshit. You could have left any time.”

“I could have. But staying meant I got to spend some time with you and catch up with some friends I hadn’t seen for a long time.”

“And Mom had nothing to do with it?” he asks.

“Absolutely nothing,” she says, even though she’s pretty sure it’s a lie. It’s a lie she’s been telling herself over and over since she got here.

She doesn’t want Henry to press her on it any further, because she might end up confessing way more than she wants to, so she stands up. “Kid, I better get going if I want to get to the garage before Billy closes up.”

She’s also conscious that she’s been here for a while and Regina’s probably going to be up any minute now to tell her that she’s overstayed her welcome.

She heads for the door, but pauses for a moment, her eye caught by a familiar cover on Henry’s bookshelf. She picks up the book of fairytales and smiles as she runs her thumb over the cover and flicks through the pages. It’s a lot more worn than she remembers and she wonders if it was a comfort to him when his world was turned upside down.

“You still read this?”

Henry shakes his head. “Too old for fairytales,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She’s not sure she entirely believes him; the fact that she’s standing here makes her think that he still believes in happily-ever-afters even if they haven’t always worked out.

“No one’s too old for fairytales,” she says, because even though she’s a lost cause she doesn’t want Henry to be.

She heads back downstairs, hesitating before walking into the kitchen where she can hear Regina chopping vegetables. She’s immediately assailed by the smell of freshly-chopped onions and she can feel her eyes start to water. There’s an already large pile of chopped onions and several more waiting by the chopping board.

“Wow. Are you manufacturing chemical weapons in here?”

“French Onion soup,” Regina says, a little tersely, with her back to Emma. She continues cutting onions, the sound of her knife on the chopping board sounding a little angry to Emma’s ears. It’s been a long time since she’s been in the kitchen with Regina, but she recognises emotive chopping when she hears it.

She hesitates, wondering if now’s the best time to do this, but she’s not sure there’ll ever be a good time. “Regina, I need to talk to you.”

“What is there to talk about, Emma?”

She doesn’t see the point in dissembling anymore and jumps right in. “I want to stay involved in Henry’s life. I didn’t ask three years ago and I don’t want to make that same mistake again. I’m not asking for custody or anything, but I’d like to come up and see him on the weekends sometimes and talk to him on Skype. That sort of thing.”

“Okay.”

She’d expected more fightback from Regina and she can’t help but wonder what the answer would have been back when they’d first broken up. She regrets not pushing for it then, regrets all the moments she’s missed and the time she’s lost with Henry.

She’s not sure where the impulse comes from–maybe it’s a product of her conversation with Henry–but she can’t stop herself from asking, “Are you happy?”

Regina ignores the question for a moment, finishing chopping the onion she has in front of her. Finally, she turns and her answer is simple. “Yes.”

It leaves no room for misinterpretation, no room for doubt, but even still, Emma’s left wondering. Maybe it’s the onions and the steady stream of tears they’ve left running down Regina’s face, or maybe it’s the way her voice sounds a little thick as she says it–probably again due to the onions.

“Is that all?” Regina asks, turning back to her onions. It’s a clear dismissal.

“Yeah.” She takes a step and then hesitates, forcing the words that come next, trying to make the sound sincere. “Um… good luck with the wedding,” she says, before walking out of the kitchen.

Maybe it’s her imagination, but she thinks she hears a sob as she leaves. It’s just the onions, she tells herself again. She leaves Regina’s house, more than a little unsettled.

She heads straight to the garage and Billy gets to work on her car, apparently having been released from whatever diabolical contract Zelena had been holding him to. He avoids eye contact when she hands over the bag of assorted car parts and his body language seems to suggest he’s more than a little bit ashamed of his part in Zelena’s scheme. She doesn’t press him on that point, happy just to have visible signs of progress.

The next morning, she leaves Storybrooke.


	8. Chapter 8

She’s just put dinner in the microwave when there’s a knock at the door. No one’s knocked at her door since that night when Henry had shown up a few weeks ago and she chastises herself for the little bit of hope she feels, because she knows there’s nothing to look forward to. This time it’ll be the downstairs neighbour complaining about the sound of her TV or the custodian wanting to check on something in her apartment, or maybe a takeout delivery that’s meant for next door.

She doesn’t exactly hurry to answer the door and when she’s almost there, there’s another impatient knock that sounds.

She rolls her eyes, because she’s pretty sure that whatever it is couldn’t actually be that urgent. She undoes the deadlock, wrenching the door open, ready to tell off whichever asshole is interrupting her while she’s trying to make her dinner.

Except it’s not a neighbour, or the building’s custodian. It’s Regina and she’s holding a familiar-looking yellow envelope, just like the one she’d handed over a couple of weeks ago. When she looks closer, she notices the ripples in the paper, remnants of the beer she’d spilt on them all those weeks ago.

She forgoes a greeting wanting to get whatever this is over with as quickly as possible, because everything that happened is still a little too fresh. “Was there a problem with those?” Emma inclines her head in the direction of the envelope, although she can’t imagine why Regina would be bringing them to her now, days after the wedding, when it’s already too late.

Regina ignores her question. “Can we talk?”

Emma folds her arms and takes up as much of the doorway as she can. It’s taken her this long to try and get herself back on track after her visit to Storybrooke, and she knows that if she lets Regina in she’ll be back to square one. It’s only been a couple of weeks and that brief amount of time is like a small band-aid on a gaping wound.

“What is there to talk about?” she says, and she can’t help the hostility that creeps into her voice. She’s always been polite, even when she’s felt like setting the whole world on fire, but maybe it’s time she tries something different.

Regina’s fidgeting with the ring on her finger, spinning it round and round and Emma can’t look at it, this final piece of evidence that what they had is no more.

“Please, Emma? Can I come in?”

She wills herself to step back and close the door and she almost does, but she’s always been weak where Regina’s concerned. Instead, she stands there, frozen with indecision and her traitorous eyes finally flick downwards to the ring on Regina’s finger. It should be the resolve she needs to get her moving, but instead she’s left confused by the sight of the plain silver band that she’d carried in her own pocket for so many years.

Regina seems to notice the source of Emma’s confusion, because that self-conscious hand is back twisting the ring around her finger.

Regina’s hands had always been one of the things Emma had liked the most. They were always a good barometer of her mood, rarely ever still, but Emma’s at a loss to understand what they’re telling her now, because none of this makes any sense.

When Regina repeats her question, this time Emma does step back but she doesn’t shut the door. Instead, she turns and walks into the kitchen where the microwave is beeping insistently. She takes her dinner out, stirs it mechanically and then puts it back into the microwave for another couple of minutes. She’s no closer to figuring out what to do or say, but she finally turns to Regina who has followed her into the kitchen and is waiting patiently for her to finish.

She folds her arms across her chest “Why are you here, Regina?”

“Marrying you was the stupidest, craziest thing I ever did,” Regina says, and Emma can’t help the way her face falls at that, even though intuitively she’s always known it to be true.

“I don’t know why you had to come all the way to Boston to tell me that.”

Regina makes an exasperated noise. “If you’d let me finish, I would have said I never regretted it for a second.”

Emma looks at her sceptically. “Never? Not even the morning after the night before when you woke up and realised what we’d done?”

Regina smiles. “Not even then.”

That morning had been something else. The hangover she’d had was one for the ages and just about every other part of it had bordered on the surreal.

_“Morning.”_

_The bed was unfamiliar and for a minute, so was the sleep-drenched, slightly husky voice that greeted her. She spent a long moment trying to catalogue what she could piece together of the previous evening, starting with the way that husky voice had her stomach doing loop-de-loops and ending with the ring that wasn’t supposed to be on her finger._

_“Did we…”_

_“A: Drink too much tequila, B: have sex, or C: get married? Which of those would you prefer the answer to be?”_

_Emma gaped at Regina._

_“The answer is D: all of the above.”_

_“You seem surprisingly okay with all of this,” Emma said when she finally managed to remember how to speak. She was still trying to process all of this very confusing new information._

_“I think I might still be drunk,” Regina confided. She ran her fingers through her hair and Emma found herself briefly lost for words again, because no one had any business looking that hot after such a big night._

_The languid smile that crept across Regina’s face seemed to support that assertion and the hare-brained idea Regina came out with next only confirmed that she must still be incredibly drunk. “You can say no, but I kind of want to show you off to my mother before we get this annulled.”_

_Emma raised an eyebrow. “You want to introduce a one-night stand to your mother?” As much as she was sure she’d meant the vows that she couldn’t actually remember reciting, she wasn’t entirely convinced this was a meet the parents kind of situation._

_“I want to introduce my_ wife _to my mother,” Regina corrected. “_ Everything _about this will drive her insane.”_

_Emma dimly remembered a conversation about just how terrible Regina’s mother was, sometime between the third tequila shot and singing in a karaoke bar. She blinked a few times, trying to figure out if she was actually awake or if this was all some sort of weird dream. She half-expected Ashton Kutcher to jump out any minute now with a TV crew._

_“Was this your plan all along? Find some innocent, unsuspecting blackjack dealer and fuck her brains out until she was confused enough to agree to be the Jason Alexander to your Britney Spears?”_

_“Honestly, my plan went about as far as finding some tequila and then some more tequila and forgetting all about my extremely shitty week. You were an unexpected bonus.”_

_And maybe she was still drunk, or maybe it was the way Regina was looking at her and her body’s sudden memory of Regina’s hands, but somehow, the idea of drawing this out a little longer didn’t seem entirely terrible. In fact, it seemed quite the opposite._

_“I’ll do it.”_

And she had. And what was supposed to be a day or two of half-pretence had somehow turned into a week and then Emma found herself following Regina home to Storybrooke to something that was real. Until it wasn’t.

She folds her arms tighter, as if they could physically shield her heart from the hurt she knows Regina could cause.

“What’s changed, Regina? A couple of weeks ago you were all set to marry someone else and you were chasing me for a divorce.”

Regina takes a slow step towards her, hands out in front of her, like Emma’s a particularly skittish horse.

“I’ve spent a long time trying to convince myself that you didn’t mean as much to me as you did. For a while, it was the only way I could survive, until not having you in my life became a habit again. Seeing you again, though, I realised I’d been fooling myself that whole time. The truth is, I never stopped missing you,” she finishes softly.

“I’ve missed you too,” Emma says, and it feels completely inadequate to capture the magnitude of the hole Regina left in her life and the way she suddenly feels like things are knitting together again.

But there’s more to this whole situation than this and Emma can’t forget that, no matter how pretty Regina’s sentiments are. “What about Robin?” Emma forces herself to ask, even though he’s the last thing in the world she wants to think about. “Do you love him?”

“I…” Regina pauses for a long moment and Emma’s sure that this is the moment Regina realises she’s made a mistake coming here. “He was easy. An attempt to fill the void you left behind and for a time, it almost worked. But when I thought about what my life would look like without him in it, I realised it wouldn’t really change that much and I knew I was making a mistake.”

She needs to be sure, so she presses Regina further. “Were you happy?”

Regina looks down at her hands and then back up at Emma. “He’s a good man, and maybe I would have been happy with him, but there was never a moment with him that came close to what I felt with you. I don’t want to settle, Emma. I want to try again.”

She wants to say yes. The way Regina’s looking at her, eyes shining and hopeful, the soft way she says her name, the way her hands start to reach for her that would make it so easy to fall right back into her arms like the last three years were just a bad dream. She wants to say yes, but there are a million reasons why she shouldn’t.

Over the past three years, there have been more than a few nights where she’s fantasised about this exact moment, usually in between the first and the second thirds of a bottle of scotch. But now, with her dreams made flesh, she’s filled with the kind of nagging doubts that had plagued her through the latter days of their marriage.

And now, she can’t help but think that if Regina had pushed Robin aside that easily, days before she was supposed to stand up and marry him, there’s no reason to believe that she won’t have the same kind of second thoughts about her. After all, she knows Regina’s already walked away once.

She wants to say yes, but she doesn’t, because she’s not sure she could piece herself back together this time.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says instead, locking her heart away tight where it can’t be hurt again.

“I’m sorry. I thought…” Regina shakes her head and Emma’s resolve is sorely tested when she sees the tears welling in her eyes. “Never mind,” Regina says, her tone clipped, and Emma can see the mask descend until it’s like the last few minutes never happened. “I won’t bother you again.”

She closes the door gently behind Regina and leans against it, clenching her fists as hard as she can so her traitorous hands won’t be tempted to open the door. She can hear Regina take a couple of steps down the hall, pause for a while and then finally she’s safe. Finally, she hears those familiar footsteps receding into the distance, and this time she thinks they might be carrying Regina out of her life forever.


	9. Chapter 9

Emma crumples up the wrapper from her burger and tosses it into the backseat along with the remains of several others just like it that have piled up over the course of the week. The car smells of stale grease and she’s nauseous from sleep deprivation and too much crappy fast food.

It’s two in the morning and she’s spent most of the past week right here, to the point where she doesn’t know where her ass ends and the car seat begins. She’s barely talked to another human being in days, apart from the kids working whichever drive-through she’s sourced that evening’s extremely nutritious meal, and she’s starting to miss a sense of connection with the real world.

It’s not like this is anything new; she’s been on more long, boring stakeouts than she can count, sleeping all day and sitting hunched down in her car, camera by her side all night, waiting for that million-dollar shot. They’re always tedious and she always finds herself wishing for a nice soft bed sometime around hour two, but lately it’s been different. She’s restless in a way she hasn’t been in a while, since she was still with Regina, in fact. Then, the restlessness had been about wanting to get home to Regina, to Henry, but now there’s nothing waiting for her other than an empty apartment and a slightly lumpy bed.

Except, there could have been. It’s been exactly one week and six days since Regina knocked on her door and Emma turned her away. It’s been one week and six days of second-guessing herself, because for most of the last three years she would have been over the moon if Regina had showed up and had that same conversation with her.

She doesn’t regret her choice, exactly, because in the moment it had seemed like the right thing to do. The fact remains that there had been all sorts of problems with their relationship that couldn’t be solved with romantic gestures. Trying to pick up exactly where they left off seems like a recipe for history repeating and Emma’s not sure she can handle losing Regina and Henry all over again. Except, there’s also the very inconvenient fact that without them she’s still totally, utterly miserable.

Her mark finally shows for the meeting, and this time she gets a good shot of him handing over an envelope of cash to a local gang member and it should be enough to fulfil her contract. She sends the pictures through to her employer and then waits a few more minutes until the coast is clear before starting the drive home.

She’s beyond tired and maybe she’ll blame that for driving past her exit on the freeway, but that excuse won’t fly when she misses another exit and another still. Before she knows it she’s on her way out of Boston.

It’s not the stupidest thing she’s ever done, but spontaneously deciding to drive a couple of hundred miles out of state at three in the morning probably does rank up there. She’s not even sure what she’ll do when she gets there, but she figures she’s got a few hours of driving ahead of her which is probably just enough time to get her head straight. And it is, because by the time she’s driving through the outskirts of Storybrooke there’s a plan forming for what she’s going to say to Regina.

She pulls up at 108 Mifflin Street, and Regina’s car isn’t in the driveway. The front door’s wide open, though, and after a cursory knock she walks in, because she can’t imagine Regina leaving it that way. She makes her way cautiously through the house.

There’s a noise coming from the kitchen and she begins to creep her way over there until she realises it’s Henry and he’s sitting eating breakfast without a concern in the world. She walks in a little more normally, reassured that nothing untoward is going on.

“Hey, kid. Is your mom around?”

He shakes his head and continues shovelling cereal into his mouth. Eventually he pauses for a breath and says, “She has an early lecture on Tuesdays. It finishes at 11 and then she has office hours.”

She wasn’t sure what kind of reception she’d get, but he seems far less interested in her presence than she would have expected and she can only assume that some of the news of her previous encounter with Regina filtered its way down to him.

She looks at her watch. It’s after nine and a thought occurs to her. “Shouldn’t you be in school already?”

He shrugs, seeming completely unconcerned by this.

“Come on, hurry up with your breakfast and I’ll drive you to school.” She crosses her arms and waits impatiently for him to eat the last few spoonfuls.

Finally, after what seems like an age, he puts his empty bowl in the sink and follows her out to the car.

“So what _are_ you doing here?” Henry asks, once they’re on the road.

“I need to talk to your mom.”

“I got that. But what do you want to talk to her about?” There’s a thread of steel in his voice, a protectiveness that makes her certain that he knows at least a little of what’s going on.

She hesitates, not sure how much to say, because she doesn’t want him to become invested in something that may never come to pass. “I want to talk about the future,” she eventually settles on, because it’s as neutral as she can manage while still being honest.

“You turned her down.”

“I did,” she admits. “She took me by surprise and I needed time to think.”

“What was there to think about? You love her and she loves you, right?”

She sighs, because as much as Henry often seems older than his eleven years, sometimes he very clearly isn’t. “It’s not that simple, kid. That was all true when your mom and I were together before, but look how it ended.”

“So does that mean you’re going to get back together?”

It’s not her place to make promises about their future to Henry, especially not yet, when she hasn’t even talked to Regina.

“I don’t know yet. Your mom and I have a lot to talk about and I’m gonna need you to be patient while we figure things out. Can you promise me that?”

“I guess so,” he says grudgingly.

They get to Henry’s school and she pulls up at the front gate. He doesn’t hop out straight away and she waits for him to say whatever else he needs to get off his chest. Eventually, he says, “Don’t hurt her again,” and his gaze is stern, serious and he doesn’t look away until she gives him a response he’s happy with.

“I’ll do my best, kid.”

He gives her a gruff nod and the opens the car door.

“Have a good day at school.”

With Henry out of the car, all she has to focus on is what she’s going to do when she sees Regina. The twenty-minute drive to campus seems to stretch ahead of her like an eternity and she catches herself going over the speed limit more than once. When she gets there, it seems the parking gods are smiling on her, because she gets a spot almost straight away.

It’s almost ten and she thinks about heading straight to Regina’s office to wait for her, but the department secretary’s sure to try and pump her for gossip and Emma’s not in the mood for those sorts of games right now. She decides to try and find Regina’s lecture instead.

She’s pretty sure she knows which lecture theatre Regina will be in; she’s seen her lecture once before when Regina had left an important presentation at home and Emma had driven it in.

She finds the building with a little help from an overly-friendly student. One of the back doors is open and she can hear Regina’s voice faintly echoing out in the hallway. She tiptoes in through the open door and takes a seat up the back in one of the wings when Regina’s looking down at her notes.

She’s magnificent like this, completely in her element, a room full of college kids hanging on her every word. And Emma’s right there with them, even though she doesn’t have the faintest idea what Regina’s talking about. Maybe she would have done better in school if she’d had teachers like this. Or maybe not.

There’s a break in Regina’s flow and Emma stops daydreaming long enough to realise Regina’s looking right at her. When she makes eye contact, there’s a questioning eyebrow raise and she gives a guilty wave in return.

It’s not long before Regina’s wrapping up the class and when she looks at her watch, she suspects that the lecture’s finishing more than a little ahead of schedule.

She hangs back, waiting impatiently for the small crowd of students around Regina to dissipate, rolling her eyes at one overly keen guy who seems determined to repeat back literally everything Regina had just said. Regina catches her eye and there’s a pleading look like she’s trapped in a vat of quicksand and Emma’s her only hope.

Emma never could resist a damsel in distress, so she walks up purposefully like she’s got a legitimate reason for interrupting what is still, officially, lecture time.

“I’m sorry. I’m going to have to borrow Professor Mills. We have a meeting with the Dean that’s starting in a couple of minutes,” Emma lies as smoothly as she can.

It’s good enough, because the last of the crowd leaves and then she’s standing there with just Regina, feeling a little stupid and uncertain. What seemed like a good idea at three in the morning might not hold up to the light of day and she wonders if she’s made a mistake coming here.

Regina’s looking at her, obviously waiting for her to say something, but she’s not quite ready to broach the subject that brought her here. Instead, she tries to fall back on inane pleasantries, which has never really been her strong point.

“I really enjoyed your lecture on…” Emma wracks her brain trying to remember the topic and comes up empty. “On whatever that was,” she finishes lamely. “Although clearly not as much as that guy.” She tilts her head in his direction just in time to catch him turn and give her a dirty look.

Regina gives her a look that suggests she’s just about done with life. “Thanks for the rescue. Nothing like having a sophomore spend several minutes mansplaining my own research to me.”

“Happy to be of service.” And she really is, because she remembers exactly how much Regina hates that kind of thing.

There’s a brief smile at that, but then Regina’s eyeing her warily. “So why are you here, Emma? Other than rescuing me from my own students.”

“I was kind of hoping we could grab a coffee, unless you do actually have a meeting with the Dean.”

“I have office hours starting in a few minutes, but I suppose can be late. Let me just let the department secretary know.”

They walk across campus in silence, neither of them quite ready to make the first move. Emma’s still trying to work out what to say and she supposes that after their last interaction, the ball’s very much in her court.

They reach the coffee stand and Emma still hasn’t figured out how to start this conversation. Ordering their drinks is a further distraction that lets Emma delay things and she doesn’t even respond to Regina’s eye-roll when she pours a couple of packets of sugar into her already syrup-laden drink. 

They sit down and Emma realises she can’t draw this out any longer.

“I know you said you didn’t file the divorce papers, but I want you to. And not with any of that stuff you added in. I don’t want the money or the condo or any of that other stuff.”

“It’s what you’re entitled to,” Regina says, her voice tight and it belatedly occurs to Emma that maybe that wasn’t the best thing to lead with.

Doing this on about minus twenty hours of sleep maybe wasn’t the smartest thing to do, because things that sounded perfectly logical in her head while she was halfway between Boston and nowhere before the sun had even come up suddenly don’t sound so sensible.

Emma shakes her head, trying to clear the cobwebs from it. “I’m not saying this very well.” She tries again. “Regina, I want this. I want _us_ , but I need to start with a clean slate. We can’t just go back to the way we were, because that didn’t work.”

Regina takes a sip of her coffee, pulls a face and steals one of the extra packets of sugar Emma had grabbed.

“You know we can’t just pretend we were never married, right? It doesn’t work that way.”

“I _know_ that, but what we _can_ do is try to start things the right way this time.”

“Last time we saw each other, you didn’t want to start this at all. Why the sudden change of heart?” Regina asks, in what is almost the mirror image of their conversation a couple of weeks ago. There’s a certain frostiness to Regina’s voice, and Emma supposes she deserves that.

“I wanted to say yes. _So_ much.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was afraid that you’d hurt me again. Losing you and losing Henry once was unbearable; I couldn’t handle it a second time. But then I realised I was miserable anyway, knowing there was a chance after all this time, so here I am.”

And maybe this is a step in the right direction, because for once they’re actually talking things through.

“And here you are.” Regina smiles, a little shakily, and Emma feels like a weight’s been lifted from her chest, because for now, they’re going to be alright.

“I want to take this slow. I’m going to keep my place in Boston for now and I’ll come to Storybrooke on weekends. And I’ll rent a room at Granny’s.”

That last statement has Regina raising an eyebrow. “Maybe you should stay at the Convent instead,” Regina says and Emma can read exactly what she’s thinking right now.

“I’m not saying no sex ever, but we’ve always been very good at using it to avoid talking about difficult subjects, or even just talking at all. We know that side of things was always good, but I want to make sure the rest of it is too.”

Regina sighs. “I know. I’ve just missed… a lot of things,” she says, and the way she looks up at Emma through her eyelashes almost has her abandoning that resolution even before it’s begun.

“I should let you get back to your office,” Emma says, even though she’s more than a little reluctant to leave.

“I’ll walk you back to your car,” Regina says and then a moment later she catches hold of Emma’s hand. And that’s the moment when Emma finally relaxes and lets herself be happy.

They reach Emma’s car and she leans back against it. Regina’s still holding her hand, but she steps back a little and looks at Emma contemplatively.

“So how far does this no sex thing go? Am I allowed to kiss you, or would that be jumping too far ahead of schedule?”

Emma pretends to consider the question for a moment. “Well… I suppose a kiss is tradition at the end of a first date and we just had coffee…”

“Which is, in many cultures, a widely-accepted format for a first date,” Regina finishes for her. She smiles in a way that has Emma’s stomach doing backflips and when she leans in, Emma’s already there to meet her.

Regina’s lips are soft against her own at first and then they’re strong, demanding and she’s breathing in nothing but Regina. She weaves her fingers through Regina’s hair, revelling in the feel of soft silk, holding her close, never wanting to let her go. 

They fit together just like they always have and all through Emma’s chest is light and heat, like a star being born. They’re incandescent together and suddenly the universe feels infinite and infinitely small.

Somehow, over the rush of blood between her ears she hears a voice in the background.

“Oh wow! Is that Professor Mills?”

Regina’s heard it too and she pulls back a little, obviously embarrassed. “Oh god,” she groans.

“Sorry.” Emma says, even though she’s not feeling particularly apologetic.

“Don’t be,” Regina says, before ducking back in for another quick kiss. “I need to get back to the office before I do something that really gets my students talking.”

Emma bites her lip, because right now she really, really, really wishes Regina would do just that.


	10. Chapter 10

The drive home – the drive back to Boston – is harder every time she does it.

Emma’s spent plenty of time on never-ending stakeouts, so she knows just how long a minute, an hour, a day can seem. But even by those standards, the days she spends in Boston drag on and the weekends in Storybrooke are over in the blink of an eye.

She spends a lot of tedious hours on the road thinking about the nature of time and what it means. She and Regina had been together less time than they’d been apart, but three years hadn’t been enough to wash away the imprints Regina had left all over life.

She remembers hearing that time is non-linear and she hopes that’s true, because maybe there’s a happy ending that comes sometime after a divorce that came before they’d ever really had a chance to get to know each other. They’re bending time now, folding it back on itself so they can make the milestones they never really reached before. There’s a first date and then a second, a third, a fourth, a tenth. There are kisses goodnight, and slow, careful connection and reconnection.

Tonight, she’ll get home to an empty apartment and she’ll search for a way to speed time up again, but the hands of the clock are heavy and she struggles to move them, no matter how hard she wills them to turn.

She’s done more push-ups in the past three months than she’s done in the past ten years. It takes the edge off a little. There have also been more cold showers than she’s had since her days in group homes, but the days are getting colder and she’s not sure how much longer she can take it. It seems as good a reason as any to make a change. That, and a few hundred miles away, the two people she loves are settling down to sleep under another roof and she’s not sure she wants to miss out on any more of that time with them.

*****

She’s already running late, but she swings by the Sheriff’s station anyway. Mulan looks up from some paperwork and a smile lights up her face when she sees Emma. “Someone steal your spark plugs again?”

They haven’t seen much of each other in the past few months; Emma’s been caught up in rebuilding things with Regina. But she’s hoping soon enough she’ll have a chance to make up for that.

Emma shakes her head. “She’s running like a dream, spark plugs and all.”

“Somehow I doubt that, unless you’re talking about the kind of dream you have after eating cheese before bed.” 

Emma glares at her for a moment, because no one gets away with insulting her car, but then remembers that she’s here to ask Mulan for a favour.

Mulan seems completely unperturbed by any of it. She looks curiously at Emma. “So why are you hanging out in this dump instead of rushing home to that beautiful ex-wife of yours?” She pulls a face. “You know everything about that sentence is completely weird, right?”

Emma takes a deep breath, because a lot of her hopes are riding on this and she’s not sure what she’ll do if it doesn’t come off for her. “I was kind of wondering if that deputy job’s still in the pipeline.”

Mulan raises an eyebrow. “You know someone who’s interested?”

“I might,” Emma says, trying to play it cool, because she knows Mulan’s going to give her shit about this.

“As it happens, we do have a vacancy in the department,” Mulan says brightly. Then, her smile turns a little devious and Emma’s stomach drops. “The successful candidate will need to overcome a gruelling test that few have ever even come close to passing.”

“What do I have to do?”

Mulan screws up a sheet of paper and throws it to her. “Sink three baskets in a row… from the six-point line.”

She follows the line of Mulan’s finger which is pointing at a spot halfway across the office, with the photocopier in the way of a clear shot.

“Seriously?”

Mulan nods, her face solemn. “Seriously. That’s the test and you need to pass if you want the job.”

She lines the first one up and it takes every bit of expertise built during her wasted youth to sink the shot, but it’s clean. The second one falls just as nicely and she throws a smug grin in Mulan’s direction, because she’s just about to ace this stupid test. She’s already celebrating internally, and maybe that’s why she’s a little too casual taking the shot, because it bounces off the rim and rolls sadly across the office, a testament to her crumpled dreams.

“Can I have another shot?”

“No second chances here,” Mulan says, shaking her head.

Emma’s face falls because it seems like she’s screwed everything up.

Mulan sighs and tosses something in her direction. “Okay, this just feels too cruel. I thought it would be funny but it’s more than a little tragic.”

Emma catches it reflexively and when she looks down at her hand, she realises she’s holding a shiny new deputy badge.

“The job’s been waiting for you this whole time. I mean, it’s not like I’m ever going to find a more qualified candidate around here.”

*****

“You’re late,” is the greeting she gets from Regina when she opens the door.

It’s not quite the welcome she was hoping for, but then Regina’s pulling her inside by the lapels of her jacket and pushing her up against the now-closed front door. A moment later she’s being kissed absolutely senseless. And okay, this is more like it, and maybe she _shouldn’t_ rush to move back to Storybrooke if this is the kind of welcome she’s going to get.

“I missed you,” Regina rasps out and Emma can’t help but wonder where she managed to find enough air to speak, because after that kiss Emma’s not entirely sure she’s actually even alive any more. 

As much as she’s enjoying this, she can hear Henry’s thundering footsteps stirring upstairs, so she kisses Regina softly and whispers, “Later.”

“Promise?”

“Definitely.”

She straightens out her shirt just in time for Henry to come running down the stairs.

“Hey, Emma.” He pulls a face that makes her think maybe she hasn’t been quite as clever as she thought she had and she self-consciously rubs a thumb against her lips, because it seems like Regina’s not wearing kiss-proof lipstick.

“Go set the table, kid.”

He grumbles about it for a moment, until Regina points in the direction of the kitchen, with a stern _go_.

“Maybe you guys are so gross that I’ve lost my appetite,” he tosses back over his shoulder, but she can see that he’s grinning as he walks away.

“If only he’d lose his appetite,” Regina sighs. “I swear he’s grown two shoe sizes just this week.”

They follow him in a moment later and sit down to dinner.

Emma pushes her food around on her plate instead of inhaling it in her usual style because she’s absolutely bursting to tell them her news.

Regina eyes her curiously. “What’s going on, Emma?”

“I’ve got a job in Storybrooke.”

“How long for?” Henry asks and neither he nor Regina are nearly as excited as she thought they would be.

“Forever, I hope, if that’s okay with you both.” She pulls the badge out of her pocket and slides it across the table. “You’re looking at Storybrooke’s newest deputy sheriff.”

That seems to get the message across, and this time the response is a little more in line with what she’d been hoping for. Henry picks up the badge and starts trying out poses with it and Regina smiles softly at her. And if Emma didn’t know her well enough she’d take that reaction at face value, but there’s a tension around her eyes that Emma can’t help but notice.

Later, lying in bed, she gets to the bottom of it.

Emma props herself up on her elbow and searches Regina’s face for an answer. “I can’t help but think you’re not entirely happy about my news.”

“I am happy, Emma,” Regina says a little too emphatically and Emma shakes her head, because she can tell there’s a lie in there somewhere.

“So why does it seem like the opposite?” she asks.

Regina sighs. “I’m happy for _me_. Having you here is all I’ve ever wanted. But is this what you really want? Tying yourself to a job that you’re ridiculously over-qualified for?”

“It’s just a job, Regina.” Even with the situation, she can’t help but laugh, because Regina seems to have this strange misconception about what she actually does.

“Do you know what I did this week while I was away? One day I spent hours sifting through someone’s garbage. Another day I spent ten hours straight sitting in my car waiting for a meeting that never actually happened. And yeah, I caught a couple of bad guys and I got paid and that was about it. The whole time, though, all I could think about was how much I couldn’t wait to get back to you.” She reaches out and smooths the line that’s formed between Regina’s brows, runs her fingers down the angle of Regina’s jaw.

“I do this stuff because it’s what I’m good at, so why not get paid to do it right here in Storybrooke where you and Henry are?”

“What if you get tired of it?”

Emma shrugs. “Maybe I’ll try my hand at gardening or bartending or something else entirely. Whatever it takes, I’ll find a way to stay here, because _this_ is what makes me happy.”

She leans in and kisses Regina gently. “I love you.”

And now, when Regina says it in return, Emma has no more doubts.

**Author's Note:**

> So I kind of wanted to write a Divorced Lesbian Mommies fic, because it's not a trope I've played with before, but I realised partway through the writing of it that there's a reason for that and the reason is I'm crap at doing established relationship stuff. I also wrote myself into a hole and decided to solve it by throwing trope after stupid trope at it, so if this whole thing seems a little uneven and underdone, that's because it probably is.
> 
> I also ignored my instincts and sidelined Robin a lot more than I probably wanted to, because I know a lot of people hate having him in fic at all, but I kind of initially wanted to use him a bit more as an antagonist. Instead, he's just a large, inconvenient plank of wood looming in the background but not actually having any real thoughts, feelings or personality (and okay maybe that's not entirely out of character).


End file.
